![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2022\/02\/IMG-0117-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n More than a few of you are almost certainly familiar with the regular weekly followHIM Podcast<\/em><\/a> that is hosted by Hank Smith and John Bytheway.\u00a0 (It\u2019s very popular.)\u00a0 Unfortunately, their long run of excellent episodes hit something of a rough patch with the last two installments:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Genesis 18-23 \u2014 Part 1 : Dr. Daniel C. Peterson (51 minutes)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n How do the ancient Near Eastern traditions regarding hospitality affect the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah? Dr. Daniel Peterson explains how Abraham, Lot, and Sarah learn to trust the Lord and wrangle some of the more difficult passages regarding Sodom and Gomorrah.<\/span><\/p>\n Genesis 18-23 \u2014 Part 2 : Dr. Daniel C. Peterson (one hour and nine minutes)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Dr. Peterson continues to discuss Genesis 18-23 and the impossible choices Sarah, Hagar, Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac make as they heed the Lord\u2019s commands,\u00a0 wrestle with identifiable human emotions, and reap considerable blessings<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But there\u2019s every reason to be confident that Brothers Smith and Bytheway will soon return to their successful, winning ways.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n With friends, we drove down on Friday to St. George.\u00a0 Soon after arriving, the four of us met with another couple of friends who now live in Washington, just outside of St. George, for dinner at Benja\u2019s Thai Garden<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019m pleased to be able to report that excellent Thai food is available in the St. George area.\u00a0 (I\u2019m not sure that this would be a requirement<\/em> for me to consider moving to an area, but it would certainly be a plus.\u00a0 It may well be that other good Thai places exist in and around St. George \u2014 there is apparently also a local Benja Thai and Sushi<\/a>, for one thing \u2014 but Benja\u2019s Thai Garden is definitely worth a return.\u00a0 (Can I get a commission on such endorsements as this?). For dinner tonight, by the way, we ate at Don Pedro\u2019s<\/a> here in St. George.\u00a0 I had an excellent<\/em> shredded beef chimichanga.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Why do I mention these experiences with food?\u00a0 Partially because I hope they\u2019ll be helpful to one or two of my readers:\u00a0 It really irritates these obsessive critics, driving them to post silly things and to send me anonymous insults.\u00a0 And, clearly, such enterprises give them enormous satisfaction.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t do it merely to help these poor unfortunates.\u00a0 I also hope that others<\/em> among my readers might occasionally find my restaurant endorsements of value.\u00a0 Of course, tastes vary and, as the standard stock prospectus boilerplate likes to say, past performance does not predict future results.\u00a0 Moreover, candidly, it\u2019s occasionally seemed that my recommendation immediately triggers the firing of the restaurant\u2019s chef and his replacement by a dishonorably discharged Marine Corps food service specialist.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Back in September of 2019, I posted this little item:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My wife and I are both serious Anglophiles. \u00a0In fact, we occasionally talk about trying to spend some relatively substantial post-retirement time \u2014 when I finally\u00a0do<\/em> retire \u2014 in England or somewhere else in the United Kingdom. \u00a0I\u2019ve always been partial to academic centers (or centres) such as Oxford and Cambridge, or perhaps up in Scotland at St. Andrews. \u00a0(I\u2019ve had week-long stays in each of the latter two.)<\/span><\/p>\n But I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019m having second thoughts.<\/span><\/p>\n We also like to relax late at night, to distract ourselves from the day\u2019s frenetic activity, with the occasional good British mystery video. \u00a0However, you can learn a lot from such shows that you might rather not have known.<\/span><\/p>\n There are, it\u2019s now clear, some very, very dangerous places in Great Britain. \u00a0We\u2019ve already been acutely aware, for example, from reading and seeing stories about Agatha Christie\u2019s Miss Jane Marple that Miss Marple\u2019s home village of St. Mary Mead \u2014 located in Downshire, which is later known as Radfordshire, which, according to the BBC, is now called Middleshire \u2014 is an extraordinarily risky place to live. \u00a0So we\u2019ve checked St. Mary Mead off the list of possible places to stay.<\/span><\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the county of Midsomer, which straddles part of Berkshire and the northern portion of Hampshire. \u00a0We\u2019ve watched many episodes of the ITV series Midsomer Murders<\/em>, and we\u2019ve become quite familiar with the bizarre crimes that frequently occur in the Midsomer county town of Causton and in the picturesque villages that surround it. \u00a0Pretty, yes. \u00a0But pretty deadly, too. \u00a0No thanks.<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, though, what about Oxford itself?<\/span><\/p>\n We\u2019ve long been fans of the Inspector Morse<\/em> detective series, and so, accordingly, we\u2019ve also watched many episodes of its spin-offs, Lewis<\/em> and Endeavour<\/em>. \u00a0Thus, we\u2019ve been appalled to learn how violent and dangerous Oxford and Oxfordshire are. \u00a0In particular, it\u2019s now clear that the faculty of the University of Oxford are an especially adulterous, fraudulent, and homicidal lot.<\/span><\/p>\n So that\u2019s not to say that we won\u2019t someday go and spend two or three months in Britain. \u00a0But we care about survival and self-preservation, too. \u00a0So, right now, I\u2019m considering safer, more serene places. \u00a0Like Baghdad or Kabul.\u00a0 Or somewhere in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, say, or near the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. \u00a0Places where we stand at least some chance of not being poisoned or ending up at the bottom of a medieval well.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Well, we went to watch the new Kenneth Branagh film Death on the Nile<\/em> today.\u00a0 And it has led me to stipulate and to announce that our next tour to Egypt will definitely not be using the Karnak<\/em> as our Nile cruise boat this next November.\u00a0 Even with Hercule Poirot on board, far too high a proportion of its passengers end up being murdered.\u00a0 So I\u2019m adding it to my list \u2014 including Midsomer, St. Mary Mead, and Oxford \u2014 of things and places\u00a0 to avoid.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Posted from St. George, Utah<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 More than a few of you are almost certainly familiar with the regular weekly followHIM Podcast that is hosted by Hank Smith and John Bytheway.\u00a0 (It\u2019s very popular.)\u00a0 Unfortunately, their long run of excellent episodes hit something of a rough patch with the last two installments: \u00a0 Genesis 18-23 \u2014 Part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67,24778,19823,19826,19829,936,28011,28034,15577,27996,11627,13834,27999,28031,2532,15580,24184,5072],"class_list":["post-94190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abraham","tag-bytheway","tag-dan-peterson","tag-daniel-c-peterson","tag-daniel-carl-peterson","tag-daniel-peterson","tag-follow-him","tag-followhim","tag-hagar","tag-hank-smith","tag-isaac","tag-ishmael","tag-john-bytheway","tag-lot","tag-peterson","tag-sarah","tag-snow-canyon","tag-st-george"],"yoast_head":"\n