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<\/a>Last night, my wife and I watched an anime<\/em> film version of Swan Lake<\/em> with a very young third-generation unit. \u00a0(The name and gender of the third-generation unit have been redacted so as to obscure a potential target, at least partially, from attacks by some of my anonymous detractors.) \u00a0 I\u2019m not a real fan of anime<\/em>, and the pacing and the dubbed voice-acting in this film were, I thought, unusually poor. \u00a0But the story is a good one and, moreover, the music was by Tchaikovsky, so I judged the benefits for the third-generation unit to be worthwhile.<\/p>\n Anyway, at the point in the story where the evil sorcerer Rothbart has tricked Prince Siegfried into declaring his love for Odile, Rothbart\u2019s equally evil daughter, thus dooming the beautiful Princess Odette, the third-generation unit erupted with indignation, crying out \u201cThis isn\u2019t a good story! \u00a0I don\u2019t like this story! \u00a0I don\u2019t want to watch it! \u00a0I hate this story!\u201d \u00a0I calmed the third-generation unit down with assurances that this wasn\u2019t the end of the tale \u2014 although, in some versions, it pretty much is<\/em> \u2014 and we held on until the satisfying resolution finally arrived. \u00a0It was a very cute moment.<\/p>\n I spent several hours today in a meeting with the three vice presidents of the Interpreter Foundation<\/a> and the leaders of a newly-founded organization called United Advocates<\/a>. \u00a0The apologetic ecology is changing a bit, and we\u2019re looking at ways to make our work more effective. \u00a0But heck, I just love meetings<\/em>.<\/p>\n In other Interpreter Foundation news, this installment of the Interpreter Foundation podcast went up today: \u00a0\u201cThe Interpreter Foundation Podcast \u2014 July 30, 2025: Abraham and His Family Conference<\/em>\u201c<\/a><\/p>\n In the 30 July 2025 episode of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and John Thompson discussed the Abraham and His Family Conference<\/em> that was held in May. You can listen to or download the discussion segment of the podcast at the link that I\u2019ve embedded above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should never, ever, have been appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services:<\/p>\n Four or five times now, perhaps, I\u2019ve publicly mentioned my one and only direct experience with water witching, or dowsing, with a divining rod. \u00a0It was successful \u2014 completely against my expectations and to my considerable shock. \u00a0(See one account here<\/a>.) \u00a0Although I\u2019ve simply described what happened in my case without drawing any grand conclusion from it, I\u2019ve been severely attacked and ridiculed in certain quarters for having recounted the story. \u00a0They like to portray me as obsessed with dowsing, as claiming great divining ability, rejecting science, and so forth, essentially because I won\u2019t falsify history by pretending that I didn\u2019t have the experience that, in fact, I had. \u00a0(It seems that some critics\u2019 professed commitment to transparency and accurate history isn\u2019t very deep, or, at least, that their ideological commitments and\/or their need to be seen as conforming to acceptable elite opinion and\/or their urge to mock me<\/em> are deeper.)<\/p>\n Anyway, with that as background you\u2019ll understand why this passage, from Eric A. Eliason, \u201cSeer Stones, Salamanders, and Early Mormon \u2018Folk Magic\u2019 in the Light of Folklore Studies and Bible Scholarship,\u201d BYU Studies Quarterly<\/em> 55\/1 (2016): 73-93, caught my attention. \u00a0Eric Eliason<\/a> (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a folklorist in the Department of English at Brigham Young University:<\/p>\n The presumption that the difference between magic and proper belief is something intrinsic rather than relational to the definer is still very much alive. \u00a0But on close analysis, complex definitions distinguishing \u201cmagical\u201d from \u201cmodern\u201d thinking rarely amount to more than \u201cWhat you<\/em> do is superstition, while what I<\/em> do is science or true religion.\u201d \u00a0One of the biggest surprises rural students have in American university folklore courses, including at BYU, is discovering their suburban peers need to be taught what divining rods are and how to use them. \u00a0Today, regardless of class, race, education, wealth, region, or religion, rural students tend to know of holding a forked stick gently in one\u2019s hand to feel for the downward tug that points to underground water and a good spot for a well. \u00a0Dowsing seems not only understandable, but essential, in rural areas where families are on their own to secure water, and where hired well drillers make no guarantees and charge by the foot. \u00a0City kids are shocked that their country classmates could be such shameless occult dabblers in a modern age where you don\u2019t have to think about where water comes from. \u00a0You just turn on the tap and out it comes \u2014 like magic. \u00a0My rural LDS students don\u2019t understand why their suburban counterparts have so little respect for or belief in a common spiritual gift often displayed by their educated and reasonable bishops and stake presidents.<\/span><\/p>\n It is simply wrong to assume that divining practices are some long-abandoned exotic aspect of America\u2019s frontier past rather than a continuing worldwide phenomenon, used not only by rural Americans, but by soldiers in Vietnam to find enemy tunnels, by oil and precious metal prospecting companies, and even by contemporary salvage professionals to recover, yes, lost treasure. \u00a0(82)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n For what it\u2019s worth \u2014 I\u2019m merely reporting here \u2014 I have a friend, a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford who holds both a Stanford law degree and an M.D. from the University of Utah, who grew up in southern Arizona and who has told me of his successes there with water witching. \u00a0And another friend, now passed on, was a professional landscape architect with (as I recall) a master\u2019s degree in horticulture who dowsed for water lines before commencing any job. \u00a0Colleagues laughed at him, he recalled, but they often cut water lines, while he reported that he never did. \u00a0Finally, I remember sitting parked with my brother near a vacant lot in a St. Louis suburb. \u00a0We were early for a flight and were enjoying hamburgers when, suddenly, a Department of Water and Power truck pulled up. \u00a0Its driver got out, fetched a divining rod from the back of his truck, and proceeded to walk up and down the vacant lot, making notes in a small book. \u00a0Then he put his divining rod back where it came from and drove away.<\/p>\n I grew up without the slightest belief in paranormal phenomena like water witching, telepathy, and clairvoyance. \u00a0I assumed that they were mere superstition, supported by no evidence, refuted by repeated negative experimental results. \u00a0My faith doesn\u2019t require that I believe in them, and lack of evidence for them would leave my theology unaffected. \u00a0But I freely confess that my experience with dowsing jarred me.<\/p>\n Years later, I went through a period in which I read a number of books by the late John Hick, a well-known Anglo-American philosopher who taught at Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University but spent most of his career at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and Claremont Graduate University in the United States. \u00a0In one of his books \u2014 I don\u2019t now remember which one of them \u2014 he surprised me by writing with considerable respect about the work of the Society for Psychical Research, in Great Britain.<\/p>\n Then, shortly after it was published in 2003, I read The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death<\/em><\/a>, written by Professor Gary E. Schwartz<\/a>. \u00a0I found it surprising, as well.<\/span><\/p>\n More recently, I read (and a few weeks ago, reread) Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind<\/em><\/a>, by the late Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. \u00a0This book opened my mind still further to the possibility that, just maybe, my onetime certainty that no evidence exists for paranormal phenomena might rest on at least slightly shaky ground.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>\n
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