Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1212

Nobody can be pure enough

    If certain folks are determined to cast themselves as victims, or to demonize you as a demonizer, they’re going to find a way to do it — no matter how sensitive and progressive you’re trying to be.   Consider, for example, this:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article...   Kind of amusing, in its way.   I [Read More...]

The impending collapse of the Middle Eastern political order?

    An article in the 11 October 2014 issue of the Economist, entitled “The rule of the gunman,” points to a very important and disturbing phenomenon in the contemporary Middle East: the disintegration of post-colonial Arab states.   Increasingly, the battles that are being fought in the region are occurring between non-state actors.   [Read More...]

An extraordinary speech on religious liberty

      A friend has called my attention to a very thoughtful and, in my judgment, remarkable keynote address delivered by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on 5 October 2014 at the twenty-first annual International Law and Religion Symposium at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School:   http://www.iclrs.org/content/blurb/fi...   It’s twelve-pages long, but they are twelve very important [Read More...]

What is hell like?

      “Hell is something liken the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” C. S. Lewis, Preface, The Screwtape Letters   Hell isn’t a matter of flames and of comical devils dressed in red satin with pointy horns and carrying pitchforks.   Lewis’s observation rings absolutely [Read More...]

“The Marshmallow Test”

    There’s an extremely interesting review, in the 11 October 2014 issue of the Economist, of what looks to be a genuinely fascinating book: Walter Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control.   Dr. Mischel is the Austrian-born psychologist, then at Stanford University, who devised a simple but clever experiment back in the 1960s [Read More...]

“Lord, is it I?”

Gender Wars in Elementary School

    I think that I’ve already posted an entry about the enlightened school district in radical-leftist Nebraska that has advised staff and teachers not to use oppressively gendered expressions like “boys and girls” when addressing its young inmates, but, instead, to call them something madly whimsical like “purple penguins” (and nothing so blandly literal [Read More...]

Rewriting history: WMDs and the popular lie “Bush lied, people died”

    An interesting article by Victor Davis Hanson about recent discoveries of caches of WMDs in Iraq:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article...        

What is Royal Skousen’s “Earliest Text”?

    I received an inquiry about this and, assuming that the questioner represents others who may not know about the book, I’ve decided to share an article that I wrote for Salt Lake City’s Deseret News regarding it back in May of 2010:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/70...        

Hurtling down the road toward tyranny

    If this account is accurate, we seem to be losing religious liberty far faster than even I had feared we might:   http://www.adfmedia.org/News/PRDetail...    The invaluable legal blogger Eugene Volokh (who teaches at UCLA Law School), thinks that the Idaho authorities are on very flimsy ground in this case:   http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/vo...   And, [Read More...]