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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n For what it\u2019s worth:\u00a0 I\u2019ve just today agreed to participate in the 2021 edition of the annual FreedomFest<\/a>, which, unusually, will be held this year in Rapid City, South Dakota.\u00a0 (For a very long time, it\u2019s been hosted in Las Vegas, Nevada.\u00a0 But not this year.)\u00a0 I\u2019m slated to participate on a panel with Ayaan Hirsi Ali<\/a>.\u00a0 That should be quite fun, and I\u2019m looking forward to it.\u00a0 If your interests lean to libertarian economic thought and\/or personal investment, this is a gathering that you might well enjoy quite a bit.\u00a0 I always have.\u00a0 The dates are 21-24 July 2021, although there is also a pre-conference tour available.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been woefully remiss in calling your attention to the interesting materials that have been appearing on the website of Evidence Central<\/em>, so here are a trio of items for you to look at over the weekend or in coming days.\u00a0 All are short and very user-friendly:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBook of Mormon Evidence: Uto-Aztecan and Book of Mormon Languages\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBook of Mormon Evidence: Barley\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBook of Mormon: Wine and Vineyards\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I also feel it a duty to alert you, albeit sometimes just a bit tardily, to new items that have appeared on the important Neville-Neville Land<\/em> blog.\u00a0 Here are a couple of them:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cElder Marion G. Romney identified the people of Latin America as descendants of the Lamanites\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJonathan Neville\u2019s pants are on fire\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I like this, from the National Catholic Register<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cUtah\u2019s New Law Could Be Part of Winning Pro-Life Strategy: New pro-life measure recognizes the father\u2019s responsibility for his unborn child, and financially empowers the mother.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As my career as a full-time member of the faculty at Brigham Young University rapidly winds down, I find myself thinking just a bit about how I got here and about the many factors that went into my getting here.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve mentioned previously that it was probably hearing Hugh Nibley and Truman Madsen speak at a BYU Education Week in either Covina or West Covina, California, that first gave me the idea that I might like to attend Brigham Young University.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Once I arrived on the BYU campus in Provo, however, I was smitten.\u00a0 I fell instantly in love with the place, but, even more so, with the sheer idea of it.\u00a0 Although I\u2019m not a Utahn by birth and arguably not by nature, BYU felt like home to me.\u00a0 I always assumed, from that point on, that my life would be deeply connected with it.\u00a0 In fact, it wasn\u2019t so much that I hoped<\/em> that I would come back to teach and work at BYU as that I simply, quietly, knew that I would.\u00a0 Even though the places that I had long dreamed<\/em> of living were either in Europe \u2014 an Anglophile who loves Alpine scenery, I vacillated between Great Britain, Switzerland, Austria, and Bavaria \u2014 or in New England or in the vicinity of Newport Beach, California.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But it was scarcely a done deal that I would return.\u00a0 Several things had to happen to make that work out, and they did.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My chosen field of concentration \u2014 Arabic and Islamic studies \u2014 wasn\u2019t exactly a BYU focus.\u00a0 It was, of course, a focus at the University of Utah.\u00a0 However, as a non-Utahn I\u2019ve never felt any particular interest in (or rivalry with) that school, which, as I recall, is located near either Richfield or Tremonton.\u00a0 So the odds were against me.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n However, the Church and BYU decided to build a Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies on the slope of Mount Scopus, overlooking the Old City.\u00a0 And that construction project became exceedingly controversial in Israel.\u00a0 Many Israeli Jews imagined that it was intended to be a mission headquarters for Jewish conversions.\u00a0 (Where they ever came up with the idea that Latter-day Saints are missionary minded, I\u2019ll never know.)\u00a0 And, in fact, very early on \u2014 as I know at first hand, having served on a Jerusalem Center committee after joining the faculty \u2014 there were some proposals, including a very tacky one that I vividly remember to this day, that would have justified that suspicion in spades.\u00a0 But missionary purposes were never primary in the conception of the Center, if indeed Church and University officials ever seriously entertained them at all.\u00a0 That memorably tacky proposal went absolutely nowhere and, very soon, it was clear that there was no point in suggesting such things.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n One basis for Israeli Jewish suspicion was that, while we were building a Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, BYU had no program in Near Eastern studies back at its home campus.\u00a0 I hasten to add that BYU wasn\u2019t being duplicitous or sneaky:\u00a0 Its conception of Near Eastern studies at the time, and at the Center still today, was primarily to teach the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (principally the gospels) on site, where their stories overwhelmingly occurred.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Still, the University now set about to create a Near Eastern studies faculty in Provo to go along with its prominent Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies facility in Israel.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In order to get a better feel for the Near East as the Center was being built, Dean Richard Cracroft of Humanities and Dean Robert Matthews of Religious Education (both now sadly departed) made a swing through Egypt.\u00a0 My good friend Professor S. Kent Brown, who had directed my Jerusalem Study Abroad group and who had then provided space in his family\u2019s apartment for me and my new wife while we searched for housing of our own in Cairo \u2014 he was there, by that point, on a fellowship, working in the Coptic Museum \u2014 wrote to me from back in the United States, advising me that, if I ever wanted to work at BYU, I should drop whatever I was doing, for as long as was needed (four days, I think, as it turned out), to show Deans Cracroft and Matthews around.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I did, and they became friends.\u00a0 (Dean Cracroft, as it turns out, eventually presided over the Swtizerland Z\u00fcrich Mission.)\u00a0 I remember having them to dinner one night at our apartment in Digla\/Ma\u2018adi, to the south of Caior on the eastern bank of the Nile.\u00a0 They were clearly deeply impressed by such things as our toilet, which had to be flushed by fetching a bucket of water and pouring it into the bowl.\u00a0 When I eventually visited BYU for interviews, Dean Cracroft took me out to lunch with Garold Davis, his associate dean.\u00a0 \u201cThe good thing about Peterson,\u201d he told Professor Davis (who also soon became a friend), \u201cis that we can get him cheap<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen how he lived in Cairo!\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My coming to BYU was also eased by my acquaintance with Dilworth B. Parkinson, of whom I had already heard several years before when I was a missionary in Switzerland.\u00a0 He was something of a legend there, but not necessarily (in my case, anyhow) in a good sense.\u00a0 After a short while as a missionary in Switzerland, he had been sent down to work with a district of missionaries in Beirut, Lebanon, which was under the stewardship of the Switzerland Z\u00fcrich Mission because Swiss neutrality was very helpful at the time.\u00a0 His ability with Arabic became famous, but one of the missionaries who had been there was brought back to Switzerland and blamed his transfer on Dil.\u00a0 This missionary, whom I never met and whose name I can no longer remember, was apparently somewhat bitter and, consciously or not, circulated many unfavorable accounts about Elder Parkinson.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n So I was horrified to hear that Dil (whom I had never met) was coming to Cairo, to spend a year there doing field research for his University of Michigan doctoral dissertation on the sociolinguistics of terms in address in Cairene colloquial dialect.<\/a>\u00a0 It took me about five minutes of speaking with him to realize that the image that I had of him was completely false.\u00a0 He kindly served as a tutor to me as I studied Arabic there for my first year and then, after he was hired to teach Arabic at BYU \u2014 essentially founding the Arabic program at the University \u2014 he was instrumental in getting me hired, as well.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n When I was hired, I was hired in some sense as a Jerusalem Center employee.\u00a0 Via arcane accounting paths that I never really cared to explore and cannot fully explain, I have always been a Jerusalem Center employee, although assigned to and responsible to the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages.\u00a0 And when I went over for several years to what became the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the primary portion of my paycheck still came from the Center via the Department.\u00a0 Or something like that.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n