Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1137

“Religion poisons everything” (1)

  Christopher Hitchens famously and repeatedly claimed that “religion poisons everything.”   His claim was and is false beyond any reasonable dispute.   Here, for example, is one of the stained glass windows from the magnificent Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Chartres in France (the Basilique Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres).   Religion didn’t poison this [Read More...]

New Testament 126

    Mark 4:26-29   The growth of the Kingdom of God goes largely unnoticed, and its importance almost completely unrecognized.   It grows quietly and matures slowly.   Come harvest time, though, and the significance of the Church and the Restoration will be unambiguously apparent.    

Do good works earn us entrance to heaven?

    Who out there wasn’t absolutely astonished to hear an airplane/airline metaphor from a man who, prior to his call to serve as a General Authority of the Church, was Chief Pilot and Senior Vice President for Flight Operations at Lufthansa German Airlines?    

Elder Nelson and the study of biology at BYU

    This past week, Elder Russell M. Nelson, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, dedicated the new Life Sciences Building at Brigham Young University.        

What does Christianity value?

    The German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis seventy years ago last Thursday, in the Flossenbürg concentration camp.  He was just thirty-nine years old.   KZ-Flossenbürg was liberated by the United States Army two weeks later, on 23 April 1945.   Pastor Bonhoeffer’s writings continue to resonate around the Christian [Read More...]

BYU wins “best delegation” award at Model United Nations competition in New York City

  For the eleventh year in a row.     And, as I believe I’ve already mentioned here, BYU’s Model Arab League team — featuring all three of my current teaching assistants and at least one other of my current students — took the regional competition in Denver a couple of weeks ago:   http://universe.byu.edu/2015/03/17/mo... [Read More...]

“What does it say about me that I want a Jesus who looks just like me?”

    A thought-provoking article from (I’m guessing) an Evangelical Protestant woman:   http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/20...   I’ve always been bothered by portraits of the mortal Jesus that make him look . . . say, Swedish, or like a good-humored California surfer dude.    

I’m far from a political supporter of Harry Reid

    And I think his complacent satisfaction about his lie regarding Mitt Romney’s taxes is utterly shameful.   But this is grotesquely inappropriate and, really, quite disgusting:   http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/pe...   My hope is that it will draw few if any signatures from active, believing Latter-day Saints.   I dislike it for a whole host [Read More...]

“Thy faith hath saved thee”

      The 117th scripture roundtable posted by the Interpreter Foundation features Cassandra Hedelius, Craig Foster, John Gee, Martin Tanner, and Bruce Webster in a discussion of 2015 Gospel Doctrine lesson 19, which is built upon Luke 18-19 and John 11:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/scri...    

Some notes on “The Little Ice Age”

    Without taking a stance here on the question of human-caused global warming, let me simply observe that the climate of the Earth is, and always has been, variable.  The fact that we speak about average and mean temperatures implies pretty strongly that, over shorter periods (“shorter” in geological terms, though not in terms [Read More...]