Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1183

An early seventeenth-century German Lutheran prayer

    “Give me … a compassionate heart, quickly moved to grieve for the woes of others and to active pity for them, even as our Lord Jesus Christ beheld our poverty and hasted to help us. Give me grace ever to alleviate the crosses and difficulties of those around me, and never to add [Read More...]

“Catholic Higher Education in Ruins”

    A thought-provoking article by Robert Oscar Lopez, a disaffected former Catholic who teaches English at the Northridge campus of California State University:   http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/201...   For much of my life, I felt serenely confident that my church and my university were immune to such things.  I realize, now, that I was being complacent [Read More...]

Use your wings!

    You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly. Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. AD 1273)

Have any of you flown with a commercial airline recently?

    If you have, and especially if you also used to fly commercially a few years ago, this may strike you as uncannily true:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRVDO...    

“The Theory of Everything”

    My wife and I went last night to see the British film The Theory of Everything, about the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his remarkable first wife, Jane Hawking.  It’s a sad film in many ways — and not only for the obvious reason of Dr. Hawking’s horrific illness.  But it’s also something [Read More...]

New Testament 14

    Matthew 3:7-10 Luke 3:7-9   Two very quick observations about these short passages:   1.   I’m often accused by certain detractors of being vicious and mean-spirited.  They’re probably right.  I’m an extremely unpleasant person to be around.  But I’ve never said, written, or published anything remotely like unto what John the Baptist [Read More...]

“Getting ready to study the New Testament”

    The bi-weekly Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News that appeared this morning was written with the 2015 Gospel Doctrine curriculum in mind:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/86...   And, while I’m at it, let me mention a recent landmark of Mormon scholarship that should be more widely known:   My long-time friend Dr. S. Kent Brown, [Read More...]

St. Polycarp of Smyrna

    “But the proconsul urged him and said, ‘Swear, and I will release thee; curse the Christ.’ And Polycarp said, ‘Eighty and six years have I served him, and he hath done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king who saved me?’” —from “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” an account of his [Read More...]

The real jihad

    “Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see — egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping, and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be ready to fight the enemy you can see.” Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. AD 1111)    

Threatened by change, I simply want to hunker down in denial and anti-intellectual obscurantism, or something like that.

    My attention has just been called to an interesting essay by Dr. David Bokovoy entitled “How to Save LDS Youth in a Secular Age.”   I may engage at greater length and detail with Dr. Bokovoy’s essay at some point in the near future — my hasty glance through it suggests much that [Read More...]