Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 147

“This is better than we thought!”

    ***   I too found his atheistic reductionism dismal.  But he was apparently a very fine scientist and he was certainly an interesting writer who helped us to understand the rich complexity of nature, and he died on the day after Christmas:   “The Miracle of Bugs: Through his study of the lowly […]

“Are religious people happier, healthier?”

    ***   I have, to this point, made no comment here (or anywhere else, really, public or private) about the very well publicized announcement by Mr. Jeff T. Green that he is formalizing his decade-long apostasy from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by demanding that his name be removed from […]

“The Corporate Christmas Carol”

    ***   Now that Christmas is securely behind us, I can share a cynical poem by an American academic, poet, and translator about the extreme commercialism that, in some cases, genuinely does mar the holiday:   The Corporate Christmas Carolby Joseph S. Salemi God rest ye merry businessmen, Start markups on your trash!Remember that […]

Is man “nothing”?

    I was thinking, this morning, about the famous passage at Moses 1:39 that says   For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.   It’s often quoted, and I think with good reason.   Many years ago, with my late friend Huston Smith, […]

“Then pealed the bells more loud and deep”

    ***   I published this column in the Deseret News for Christmas 2012.  The reference to Newtown, Connecticut, was inspired — if that’s the right word for it — by the terrible massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, which had just occurred on 14 December of that year:   His first […]

Christmas or Easter?

    ***   I often consider the question in my mind of which holiday I regard as the most important, Christmas or Easter.   I’m inclined, on the whole, toward Easter, because it commemorates two of the most fundamentally important events in both the divine plan and human history: the Atonement of Jesus Christ […]

Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar

    ***   I had certainly not planned that this year’s Interpreter Christmas message would be . . . well, from me.  In fact, I had things all arranged for an essay from someone else.  But then there were complications.  And they came too late for me to reasonably impose on anybody other than […]

“Christmastide”

    ***   And it came to pass that he cried mightily unto the Lord all that day; and behold, the voice of the Lord came unto him, saying: Lift up your head and be of good cheer; for behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the sign be given, and […]

For the season

    ***   And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God. And he […]

A mirthless joke, or merely yet another slander?

    ***   Today marks the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1805.  Which, I suppose, explains why I was awakened this morning by the distant sound of braying donkeys.  Some critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are rolling out their annual claim that Latter-day Saints […]