There’s a new outcry for solutions that will solve nothing:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427905/mass-shootings-gun-control     Read more

    I had a brief exchange in the comments section of my blog early this morning.  (Still jet-lagged, I woke up far, far too soon.)   It concerns a topic that’s important enough, and urgent enough, that I want my response to be very visible and clear.  I don’t think that I’m acting inappropriately with regard to the person to whom I’m responding because (a) s/he wrote under a pseudonym (“Big Brutha”), so his or her real-life identity is... Read more

    This week’s “Defending the Faith” column in the Deseret News:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865642903/Literally-hard-facts-at-the-beginning-of-Mormonism.html     Read more

    Video footage of the police response to yesterday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino shows officers arriving within about five minutes of the first call for help, and running toward the scene of the crime.   They didn’t have, couldn’t have had, any very clear idea of what they were running toward.  Yet they ran.   A video has surfaced of a police officer leading to safety some of those caught in the building where the massacre has just... Read more

    They’re not our friends:   http://www.vocativ.com/news/256909/isis-san-bernardino-mass-shooting-america-burning/   Incidentally, there’s a small but significant Mormon connection to San Bernardino:  The first English-speaking settlement was established by Latter-day Saints sent there by Brigham Young, presumably as part of a plan to build a chain of settlements reaching to the ocean so that Deseret could have a seaport.  Unfortunately, the colonists had to be recalled as a result of the so-called “Mormon War” of 1857.   And here’s a curiosity:  One... Read more

    This piece was published before the shootings in San Bernardino, but it seems especially relevant now:   http://time.com/4100408/a-criminologists-case-against-gun-control/?xid=fbshare     Read more

    The official Church website for its 2015 Christmas initiative can be found here:   https://www.mormon.org/christmas   Take a look!  Participate!     Read more

    I’m slow on linking to this, but I hope that it’s true:   http://themindunleashed.org/2015/11/anonymous-takes-down-5500-isis-accounts-24-hours-after-isis-called-them-idiots.html   It’s heartening to see such often-antisocial folks turning their skills to a good purpose.  I hope that others with unique abilities will also play whatever roles they can in fighting this scourge.     Read more

    John 13:31-35   It’s impossible to improve upon this passage by commentary, but I offer an unfamiliar translation (by J. B. Phillips) of a simple and very familiar text:   “Now I am giving you a new command—love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you must love one another. This is how all men will know that you are my disciples, because you have such love for one another.”   The test of discipleship isn’t, it turns... Read more

    “I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don’t read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways. . . .  It allows us to... Read more