Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1171

“How Ayn Rand, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roe v. Wade Made Me a Christian”

    A slightly unusual personal narrative of conversion:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article...    

Canada: “Christian lawyers and doctors need not apply”

    As one person informed me yesterday, I’m a fear-monger on these matters.  But, plainly, I’m not alone:   http://www.cardus.ca/blog/2015/01/chr...    

The peopling of the Americas: More complicated than some would like you to believe?

    I would like to thank Charles Henderson for having brought this intriguing article to my attention:   “3 Distinguished Linguists Examine Mysterious Origin of Native Americans”   I’m not claiming — though some will inevitably (even after this disavowal) maintain that I am — that this somehow proves the Book of Mormon true.  But, [Read More...]

Change! Innovation!

    “The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.” George Bernard Shaw, “Preface,” Three Plays for Puritans (1900)    

Non-LDS scholar John Turner on the Kirtland Temple

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousb...    

New Testament 48

    Mark 3:7-12 Compare Matthew 4:24-25; 12:15-16; Luke 6:17-19   The accounts of healings given in the passages cited above mention people coming from Galilee, Idumea, Tyre and Sidon,  the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and Judea, and from what used to be called Transjordan (that is, the area across the Jordan River, in what is today [Read More...]

The war continues, now against Christian colleges and the Boy Scouts

      David French has published a troubling article — it’s fully accessible to me, and I hope it will be to you, as well — about the besieged Boston-area Evangelical school, Gordon College:   https://live-redesign.nationalreview....   Gordon’s offense, which may prove lethal to it, is that its code for students and faculty frowns upon sexual [Read More...]

“The camera that changed the universe”

    David Wills kindly brought this utterly fascinating article (and its magnificent accompanying photographs) to my attention:   https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang...   Read it or even simply skim it, marvel, and enjoy!    

Of Arab “Obsession” with Language, and Arabian Jews

    Jabra Ghneim has brought two interesting though quite different articles to my attention.  The first describes new research into the “intoxication” with language that Western scholars have often noted in classical Arabic culture — which, the Stanford professor behind the research says, reflects a linguistic sophistication that the medieval West lacked at the [Read More...]

“The Decline of Philosophy”

    Most of you probably wouldn’t care if you heard that philosophy was in decline.  But you might care, nonetheless, about some of the issues raised in this article: http://www.realclearreligion.org/arti...