Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 187

Nostalgia, and “Poesy and Prosody in the Book of Mormon”

    My stay in St. George over this long holiday weekend has been a nostalgic one, in some ways.  Although she grew up here, my mother left for Los Angeles as soon as she graduated from high school.  But I always had maternal relatives here, and we would visit them at least once or […]

The, Umm, Will to Believe

    A few days ago, somebody — I meant to mark it, but I didn’t; I think it was  from Tracy Hall, but I haven’t been able to find it in order to be certain of that — kindly shared a little joke with me.  I hope that nobody will be too angry with […]

Revision 8.12 Proselyting and a Davidic King of Israel

    But the return of the Jews to Palestine is an astonishing thing, something that manifestly cannot be disconnected from the events that will ultimately occur in that area. Indeed, we need only think for a moment about the sheer improbability of the whole thing to begin to see its miraculous character. What other […]

“The Most that Evidence Can Do”

    Latter-day Saints are often criticized for their conviction that faith is a gift of God that one should seek.  (See Moroni 10:3-5.)  Anti-theists dismiss it as woo-woo irrationality, as if their own belief system were the self-evidently true default position regarding God and immortality or as if, rather than being itself a faith […]

Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon, and the Genuine Existence of the Golden Plates

    Just up, in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, by Amanda Colleen Brown:   “Subtle Hebraic Features in the Book of Mormon” Review of Donald W. Parry, Preserved in Translation: Hebrew and Other Ancient Literary Forms in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2020). 171 pages. Hardback, $19.99. Abstract: Donald W. Parry combines a lifetime of […]

“A far more beautiful, more perfect place”

    Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) was a Swiss-American physician and psychiatrist and the author of, among several other things, the pioneering 1969 book On Death and Dying.  Dr. Kübler-Ross was very well-known and quite influential during her lifetime — not so much for her views on life after death as for her study of the […]

Running through the forest with the Book of Mormon plates

    Later estimates of the weight of the gold plates of the Book of Mormon (by those who had briefly held them, such as the official witness Martin Harris and the unofficial witness William Smith) put that weight at somewhere in the range of forty to sixty pounds.  Some critics, accordingly, have contended that […]

“The Pleading Bar of God”

    I’m just back from a rather long day devoted to three interviews with scholars, to be used in the docudrama that will accompany our Witnesses theatrical film.  In my judgment, the interviews went extremely well.  I’m grateful to the three scholars who participated, to the family who put their beautiful home at our […]

Revisiting Forgotten Voices

    If you missed Sunday night’s Meridian Magazine interview with Mark Goodman, the director of the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming Witnesses theatrical film, and Caleb J. Spivak (who plays Oliver Cowdery), Mark Zuccola (the younger David Whitmer), and you don’t have Facebook, you can watch it on YouTube:     The program begins and ends […]

Religion’s War Against Science? (Plus a Second Chance)

    But, first:   The 45-minute interview last night with Mark Goodman (the director of the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming theatrical film, Witnesses), Lincoln Hoppe (who plays Martin Harris), Caleb J. Spivak (Oliver Cowdery), and Michael Zuccola (young David Whiter), came together somewhat the last moment, and the word got out rather late and, possibly […]