Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 17

They made a difference. But neither of them got an obelisk.

  My wife and I drove around today to look at the Eastman School of Music, from which two of our friends graduated, and at the University of Rochester and its medical school (where a former next-door neighbor earned his medical degree).  We crossed the Erie Canal several times and went to the former home […]

Let them ring!

  It was exhilarating to watch President Russell M. Nelson, well into his hundred-and-first year, announce fifteen new temples this afternoon.  “Some say, ‘I do not like to do it, for we never began to build a temple without the bells of hell beginning to ring.’ I want to hear them ring again.” (Discourses of […]

Missing General Conference

  Owing to our travel schedule, we missed both of the daytime sessions of General Conference today, and we’ll miss this evening’s session.  I regret that.   I feel bad about missing any part of Conference.  Since my mission — and apart from the four pre-internet years that we spent living in Egypt — I […]

“The Covenant Path of the Ancient Temple”

  I haven’t checked on my retirement savings for a while, but I’m beginning to think that I left my job much too early.  Or, to put it in a slightly different way (and with credit to the movie Airplane), “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Today being Friday, a […]

Tariffs and Free Trade

  As I closed out my undergraduate degree in classical Greek and philosophy — both highly marketable fields that, I’m sure, thrilled my long-suffering parents — I was very briefly but seriously tempted to change my field altogether and seek to go to graduate school in economics.  It’s a an area that has long interested […]

Riding a stream of consciousness from Utah to Palestine

  Many years ago, my good friend Lou Midgley and I drove up to the Salt Lake Valley one Sunday night to spend the evening at an evangelical Protestant church.  The good folks there were showing an anti-Mormon film of some kind, and Lou and I wanted to see it.  We hoped simply to sit […]

Deeper into Polynesia

  Monday was our last full day in Hawai’i, and we spent it quite thoroughly immersed in Polynesiana.  As I mentioned previously, we spent some considerable time in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, which is the Hawaiʻi State Museum of Natural and Cultural History.  Founded in 1889, it is the largest museum in Hawaiʻi and […]

Still thinking about Kamehameha the Great

  Please make a note of this:  Annual FAIR Conference — August 7-8, 2025 Mark your calendars for our FAIR Conference this August at The Barn at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah! We are thrilled to host a variety of speakers, scholars, and experts who will provide faithful responses to challenging questions. Some of the […]

Thoughts occasioned by a visit to Pearl Harbor

  This afternoon, we made a pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor, and, very specifically, to the USS Arizona Memorial.  It was sobering, as always.  We also spent time in the exhibits there and watched a couple of films about the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941.  That horrible event happened nearly eighty-five years ago, and there […]

Is religious disaffiliation on the rise?

  Religious disaffiliation is a problem (from my perspective) that interests and challenges me.  Perhaps it even represents an opportunity, if approached in the right way.  Here are a few links that are relevant to it: Pew Research Center:  “Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions: Surveys in 36 countries find that […]