![\"Flowers](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/03\/800px-080204_021.jpg\")
<\/a>A new article of mine has just appeared today in Meridian Magazine<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cFacing the Silence: Why is it So Difficult to Talk about Death?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 It\u2019s partly my way of announcing that I\u2019m likely to pass away sometime, sooner or later, within the next several decades. \u00a0Maybe even today. \u00a0Some will want to buy their party hats and noisemakers and fireworks now<\/em>, in order to avoid the inevitable run on the store shelves when it happens.<\/p>\n And this has just gone up on the completely static and unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation: \u00a0The Interpreter Foundation Podcast \u2014 July 20, 2025: The Plates of Gardner<\/em>, by Kimberley Heuston, and Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon<\/em> Criticisms, by Matt Roper<\/a><\/p>\n For the 20 July 2025 installment of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Terry Hutchinson, Mark Johnson, and Kevin Christensen discussed the Come, Follow Me<\/em> Doctrine & Covenants lesson for 4-10 August 2025 and two recent articles in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship<\/em>. You can listen to or download the discussion segment of the podcast episode below. The Come, Follow Me<\/em> segment of the episode will be published separately. The audio track is also included in our podcast feed (https:\/\/interpreterfoundation.org\/feeds\/podcast<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ve been saddened to hear of this violence: \u201cA fragile ceasefire holds in southern Syria after hundreds of Druze civilians killed:\u00a0As violence broke out last week between two ethnic groups in southern Syria, both the Israeli and Syrian governments intervened\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Every year that we\u2019ve taken groups to Israel for the past decade and a half (or whatever it\u2019s been), we\u2019ve stopped for lunch at a Druze-owned restaurant up on Mount Carmel (near the traditional site of Elijah\u2019s famous contest with the priests of Baal). \u00a0And then, on another day, we\u2019ve taken them up into the Golan Heights, an area that contains even more Druze. \u00a0(You may notice a recurring element here: A persecuted religious minority, the Druze have generally taken refuge in relatively inaccessible \u2014 and defensible \u2014 mountainous areas, what are today Israel and Syria and Lebanon, in the area called \u201cMount Lebanon.\u201d \u00a0My dissertation topic, by the way, was indirectly connected with the origin-story of the Druze movement in the early eleventh century.)<\/p>\n While in the Golan, we\u2019ve typically gone up to Mount Bental. \u00a0Just about every time we\u2019ve been up on the mountain, an elderly retired Druze math teacher has been sitting there, selling locally-grown apples \u2014 the Golan is famous for its apples and cherries and other fruit \u2014 and absolutely wonderful honey. \u00a0And he gives out samples, which almost always have the effect he wants.<\/p>\n From the United Nations observation post there on Mount Bental, we can see Mount Hermon (part of which is in Lebanon) and down into Syria. \u00a0For a while, the United Nations observers who are stationed there tell us, there were ISIS fighters living in the abandoned town of Qunaytra, just below Bental. \u00a0Al-Suwayd\u0101\u2019 is barely visible off in the distance. \u00a0In the old days, once or twice, I watched planes dropping bombs out there. \u00a0I hate to see that happen again. \u00a0I\u2019ve never actually been to al-Suwayd\u0101\u2019, but I know the general area and I\u2019ve met relatives of the people who live there.<\/p>\n I find this interesting:<\/p>\n Moreover, they could use some help from others in the area. \u00a0And there might be applications in other places, as well. \u00a0I\u2019m always intrigued, by the way, by simple, natural ways of confronting our environmental challenges. \u00a0In many areas, I suspect, our planet is capable, if permitted to do so, of healing itself. \u00a0As concern for climate change grows, for instance, it seems that there may be at least some ways of dealing with the problem that wouldn\u2019t involve vast government takeovers of the economy and private life. \u00a0Here, for example, is something from several years ago that caught my eye. \u00a0It\u2019s a cause that I could very easily support and that shouldn\u2019t be controversial: \u00a0\u201cIn New \u201cMind-Blowing\u201d Study, Planting Trees Reduces Carbon Better Than Carbon Taxes\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Still, even assuming that the scientific argument behind it is correct, I wonder whether this proposed solution will gain much support. \u00a0After all, it would furnish very little opportunity for increasing government control of the economy, multiplying regulations, empowering bureaucrats, and aggrandizing the administrative state, because planting trees is within the capacity of private citizens: \u00a0\u201cThese Mexican Villagers Have Been Working to Plant 5 Millions Trees To Ease the Climate Crisis.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 And see, also,\u00a0\u201cYouTube Star Known For Kindness Celebrates 20 Million Subscribers by Funding the Planting of Millions of Trees.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Here, it seems to me, is a charity worth supporting: https:\/\/www.arborday.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cTrees,\u201d by Joyce Kilmer<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think that I shall never see<\/span> A tree whose hungry mouth is prest<\/span> A tree that looks at God all day,<\/span> A tree that may in summer wear <\/span> Upon whose bosom snow has lain;<\/span> Poems are made by fools like me,<\/span> By the way, his name notwithstanding, Joyce Kilmer was male. \u00a0An American, a graduate of Columbia University in New York City, a convert to Catholicism, and a married father of five, he was killed by a sniper on 30 July 1918, at the age of only thirty-one, near the French village of Seringes-et-Nesles. \u00a0He had volunteered to scout out the location of a German machine gun. \u00a0Sergeant Kilmer died just a few months before the end of the First World War. \u00a0 For his courage, he was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre<\/em> (the \u201cWar Cross\u201d) by the French Republic.<\/p>\n Well, I\u2019ve got to go. \u00a0Right now if not sooner. \u00a0I\u2019m due to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters \u2014 <\/i>aka \u201cthe best movie I\u2019ve ever seen\u201d \u2014 with a third-generation familial unit who can sing every song in the movie and recite most of the dialogue and who is awaiting my arrival with rapidly mounting impatience. \u00a0(Name, gender, and other identifying information have been suppressed in order to protect my innocent progeny from the malicious attentions of my small coterie of anonymous online stalkers.)<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>\n
\nA poem lovely as a tree.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nAgainst the earth\u2019s sweet flowing breast;<\/span><\/p>\n
\nAnd lifts her leafy arms to pray;<\/span><\/p>\n
\nA nest of robins in her hair;<\/span><\/p>\n
\nWho intimately lives with rain.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nBut only God can make a tree.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>