This is rather depressing.  But it’s also a call to action:   http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6174     Read more

    It’s fashionable, in some circles, to maintain not only that Jesus isn’t the Son of God but that he never even existed in the first place.   This is silliness.   Which my Deseret News column for today tries, diplomatically, to suggest:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865619115/The-evidence-for-Jesus-is-early-and-powerful.html     Read more

    Ralph Hancock usefully rejoins the discussion about “secularism” and Mormon studies:   http://www.patheos.com/blogs/soulandcity/2015/01/whos-afraid-of-secularism/     Read more

    “I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to… Read more

  http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/heartbreaking-cartoons-from-artists-in-response-to-the-ch#.fm09vXVnpK   These are well worth a look.     Read more

    Dr. Tariq Ramadan, a grandson of Sayyid Qutb, is, very arguably, the foremost Muslim intellectual in Europe.   I’ve had some slight contact with him, including, most notably, the experience of chairing a plenary session panel that included him during the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia, in 2009.   This is a very rough transcript, but I think it important to read what so prominent a Muslim thinker has to say about the massacre in… Read more

    John 3:22   A really short reading today.  Just a single verse.  Which I’ll give here, in its entirety:   “After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judæa; and there he tarried with them, and baptized.”   Jesus and his disciples don’t seem to be in Jerusalem, because their being in the holy city would have been mentioned as significant.  They’re probably not in any major town or city, for the same reason.   Which… Read more

    Nathaniel Givens offers another interesting take on this topic, which was already raised by the article to which I linked in my post earlier today.   I welcome this discussion.  I regard it as extremely important, even urgent.  It’s urgent not because of any particular mass apostasy occurring right now — such a thing may or may not actually be happening — but, however that may be, mostly because questions of what to believe about God and the… Read more

    An excellent and (as usual) very thoughtful post from J. Max Wilson:   http://www.sixteensmallstones.org/getting-it-wrong-how-not-to-save-lds-youth-in-a-secular-age/     Read more

    As the horrific news out of Paris continues to unfold, I want to go on public record as clearly as I can.  I shouldn’t really have to do so, but at least a few out there seem to want to believe that I never acknowledge the evils done in the name of Islam.  So, once again, I acknowledge and denounce them:   I condemn, as strongly as I can, the terrorist executions carried out at the editorial offices… Read more