Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1164

Mistakes and science

    An anonymous comment about science caught my interest a few minutes ago:   Science: If you don’t make mistakes, you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t correct those mistakes, you’re doing it really wrong. If you can’t accept that you are mistaken, you are not doing it at all.    

“An honest religious thinker”

    An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1948), 73

“Reasons to Believe”

    I’m interested in people and organizations who examine the intersections and collisions between religious belief and contemporary science.   Here’s one such group, this one Evangelical Protestant in orientation:   http://www.reasons.org   I don’t always agree with them, but I generally find them interesting and often helpful.    

New Testament 77

      Luke 6:17-20 Compare Matthew 4:24-5:2; Mark 3:7-13   There is an obvious version of the Sermon on the Mount given in Luke.  It’s often called “The Sermon on the Plain.”   Is Luke giving a variant account of the incident in Matthew?   Maybe.   I think it entirely plausible, though, and not [Read More...]

A positive article in the Huffington Post (!) about LDS/LGBT relations

      Who woulda thunk it?   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tracy-h...   Of course, as an anonymous-message-board-poster-certified hater of everyone who isn’t white, conservative, and fanatically Mormon like myself, I imagine that I’m against such friendly meetings.    

“Only in sleep,” again

    Roughly a year ago, I posted an entry about an exquisitely beautiful piece of choral music that I had just heard for the first time.  (I provided the words of the moving Sara Teasdale poem on which it’s based, which might prove useful.)  Unfortunately, the best online recording of the piece that I could find [Read More...]

“We hide the word ‘Catholic’ from prospective students”

    Nearly three decades ago, when I first joined the faculty of Brigham Young University (after having fallen in love with the place as an undergraduate), I might well have read this article with a complacent (perhaps even somewhat superior) sense of “it can’t happen here”:   http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclus...   These days?  Not so much. [Read More...]

“In the gospel, faith must come first”

    A very good article in the Deseret News by Taylor Halverson:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/86...    

Seven Mormon blogs (other than mine)

    Just a reminder of several Mormon-oriented blogs by people whom I like:   http://fornspollfira.blogspot.com   http://www.patheos.com/blogs/enigmati...   https://seesangelsinthearchitecture.w...   http://www.studioetquoquefide.com   http://www.plonialmonimormon.com   http://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.ie   They’ve each added one or more entries since last I mentioned them.   And don’t forget this one, either, from another friend:   http://etherscave.blogspot.com   I’m sure that [Read More...]

Speaking on Islam (Bountiful, Utah, on Tuesday night)

    I suppose there’s a slight chance that somebody out there might be interested in this:   http://davisclipper.com/pages/full_st...