Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1254

Did the Church revise its policy on priesthood in 1978 under threat from the U.S. federal government?

    One of the very many false, misleading, distorted, uninformed, simplistic, caricatured, debatable, or at least questionable claims made in that open letter to a director in the Church Education System to which I responded in my remarks at the FairMormon conference last Friday is that President Kimball received his 1978 “revelation” — in [Read More...]

“Publish the Terror Selfies”

    The former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, long gone from that malnourished cable television network but not lamented, was in the habit of periodically bestowing the title of “Worst Person in the World” on such moral monsters as Thomas Monson and Dallin Oaks.  Now reduced to bloviating on ESPN 2, Olbermann recently pronounced Tony [Read More...]

Master of the ukulele. No. Not this guy. (Though I haven’t heard HIM, so who knows?)

    I’ve never really taken the ukulele seriously.  But it’s impossible to not be impressed by these four and one half minutes:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puSkP...   Thanks to Robby Hundley for calling this to my notice.   Some years ago, attending a concert by a mandolin virtuoso in Jerusalem, I was converted to the mandolin. [Read More...]

N. T. Wright on the ordination of practicing homosexuals

    N. T. Wright, the eminent British New Testament scholar who served from 2003 to 2010 as Bishop of Durham in the Church of England — I sometimes joke that his appointment must have been an error, since he was perhaps the first orthodox, believing Anglican/Episcopal bishop within living memory — is one of [Read More...]

“While my guitar gently weeps”

    I posted this link two or three years ago, but I like it so much that I’m posting it once more:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW...   As I said way back then, it makes me want to get serious about the guitar again.  But it also makes me despair, because the last two or three [Read More...]

Profanity and Vulgarity at the Movies

    Perhaps you haven’t already seen this powerful ad:   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFpX...    

“BYU professor speaks on unnoticed assumptions about the Book of Abraham”

      Yet another newspaper article — the fourth, by my count; three in the Deseret News and one in the Tribune — about the recently concluded FairMormon conference:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/86...    

“Comings and Goings” in Samoa

    Another update from Apia, Samoa:   http://samoamission.blogspot.com/2014...    

“We are N”

      In the 1930s and 1940s, the National Socialists or Nazis marked Jewish shops under their rule with the word Jude (or “Jew”) and forced Jews to wear yellow Stars of David as identifying badges.   In Iraq right now, ISIS, the “Islamic State in Syria,” is marking homes as “Nazarene” (i.e., “Christian”) [Read More...]

Dinner from the Mountain of Light

    We just had a really, really good dinner from Kohinoor, a restaurant on State Street in Orem:   http://www.kohinoorut.com   If you like Indian food, or if, never having tasted it, you would like to try Indian food, I recommend Kohinoor as a good place to eat (or to get take-out).