Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 205

Revision 5.17 “What the West Owes the East” (The Arts)

    Arabic influence is clearly visible in the arts and crafts of the West. Many materials associated with Western clothing were originally of Arab design. Thus, damask, a silk or linen with a design visible from either side, is named after the great Syrian city of Damascus. Muslin, a thin cotton cloth, comes to […]

Brigham Young and those “damned rascals”

    No.  No.  Darn it, I just can’t get tonight’s ugly, toxic fiasco out of my head.   The just-concluded presidential debate, in my judgment, substantially strengthened the case for (a) restoring the separation of powers between the three branches of the federal government (e.g., by shrinking the power of the executive branch), (b) […]

Of the shining city on a hill

      Sigh.  Against my resolution and my better judgment, I watched the presidential debate tonight.   I vowed several weeks ago that I would post no political blog entries here, and I’ve kept my promise.  I will make an exception only tonight, and then I’ll return to my nonpartisan silence.  I have now […]

“Physics explains everything”

    Here are four quotations about science, representing quite distinct points of view, that caught my attention and that seemed to me worthy of sharing:   “The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not […]

Revision 5.16 “What the West Owes the East” (Literature)

    Did Arabic literature have any impact upon the literature of the West? Few people in the West would suspect that it did. Yet the answer is almost certainly yes. It has been argued, for instance, that a book written in twelfth-century Andalusia by a friend of Averroës may have served as the inspi­ration […]

Processes, and events that are junction points between processes

    I really like this summation by the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli,  which appears on page 123 of his Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017):   There is a curved spacetime born 14 billion years ago — nobody knows how […]

Yet another upcoming Interpreter Foundation conference!

    Please mark your calendars!   The Temple on Mount Zion: The Fifth Interpreter Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference Saturday, November 7, 2020 — Brigham Young University   ***   Also up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   Book of Moses Insights #22: Enoch, the Prophet and Seer: Enoch’s Transfiguration (Moses 7:1–3) […]

Revision 5.15 “What the West Owes the East” (Navigation, Optics, Chemistry, Astronomy, and Calendrics)

    Few readers are surprised, probably, to learn that the name Sahara is Arabic (it means “deserts”), but the extent of our debt to the Arabs in the field of navigation and geography is shown by such Arabic terms as nadir, zenith, and azimuth, which still form an important part of those disciplines in […]

Four Nineteenth-Century Latter-day Saint Comments on Science and Religion

    The pressing need of the age is a system of religion that can recognize, at the same time, the truths of demonstrated science and the doctrines found in the pages of sacred writ, and can show that perfect harmony exists between the works and words of the Creator; a religion that will reach […]

“He was perfectly rational”

    Simon Smith, a Latter-day Saint bishop in Utah , wrote an 1880 letter to President Joseph Smith III and Mark H. Forscutt, of what was then known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, responding to their inquiries.  He told them of his visit with Martin Harris shortly before […]