Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of my wonderful brother, Kenny, who tragically took his own life at the young age of 22. The most difficult writing I have ever done was for the chapter in Home Waters that provides an account of his death and its impact on my family. I won’t revisit those details here, but I do wish to pay him special tribute and to reflect for a moment about what his death has meant.... Read more

  http://ldsearthstewardship.org/2012/12/should-lds-earth-stewardship-engage-in-political-advocacy/#disqus_thread Read more

Woody Allen, no nature lover, was fond of saying, “Nature and I are two.” Which reminds me of another joke I once heard on Car Talk. “What did the Buddhist monk say to the Hot Dog vendor?” “Make me one with everything.” (more…) Read more

“Love is not love,” famously wrote Shakespeare, “Which alters when it alteration finds.” Love’s high moral mark is its constancy, its unconditionality, its resistance to fickleness. “Love’s not Time’s fool,” he insists because it should remain unchanging in a changing temporal world. (more…) Read more

In Genesis, we are told that God pronounced the earth and all of its creations “good” but it never says what it is good for. Of course, perhaps that’s because Genesis speaks of intrinsic value, something that is inimical to our more comparative, utilitarian, and monetary meanings of “good.” One wonders, then, what to make of the special emphasis placed on the physical world in the LDS account of the creation where we learn that the world was created spiritually before... Read more

  In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln promoted the holiday of Thanksgiving. In the proclamation, Lincoln wrote of the nation’s blessings and then said: “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.... Read more

I am a scholar but I am also a believer in religion, my LDS religion in particular. For some, that might seem like a contradiction or a serious compromise of my intellectual integrity or, for that matter, of my religious faith. I see no contradiction whatsoever. I like a guideline a leader in the LDS church, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland provides for parenting that has relevance to scholarship: (more…) Read more

In a recent post, I described the general questions that would be explored at the symposium at BYU, “Conservation, Restoration, and Sustainability: A Call to Stewardship.” I wish now to provide some perspectives on the symposium, which was in my opinion a great success, with papers from plenty of participants from nearby but as far away as Japan, the UK, Australia, and Canada. All papers will be online in either podcast form or in video before too long. I will... Read more

Below is a link to a recent interview I gave for Kirk Caudle at Mormon Book Review, a new site that promises to provide interesting and valuable reviews of books published in Mormon Studies. We explored some aspects of Home Waters not normally treated, especially the issue of mental illness. Have a listen! http://www.themormonbookreview.com/   Read more

This is the title of an upcoming symposium on November 8-10, free and open to the public at the Hinckley Center on campus at Brigham Young University. This symposium is devoted to exploring the interdisciplinary dimensions of environmental stewardship in literature and the arts, law, philosophy, science, and religion. We feature papers that critique, develop, and enhance conceptions of stewardship that are grounded in current scientific and cultural understanding of environmental problems. We will hear explorations of such problems as... Read more