Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 207

Revision 5.11 “What the West Owes the East” (Take One)

    In the meantime, an immensely rich civilization—rich in every way—had been created. A bare bones description of this vast realm and of the marvelous art and architecture, literature, music, philos­ophy, and science that it produced would far exceed the space avail­able in this book. It seems to me, however, that a good method […]

When the neat world depicted by science fell apart

      It used to be that scientists and those influenced by them viewed the world as an assemblage of interlocking gears, a machine.  This was the time of the Enlightenment and of “Rationalism.”  The machine simply had to be disassembled and its various constituent parts examined, and then everything would be both understood and […]

Of seer stones and hearing angels sing

    I offer here three quotations from Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2014), on two distinct topics.   The first two relate to seer stones, a topic that, while it’s certainly not a major theme of the theatrical movie, is alluded to at several […]

Revision 5.10 “The Decline of the Abbasid Caliphate”

    But the emphasis of the ‘ulama’ on law and on behavior came, in the eyes of some highly committed Muslims, to seem a mere con­centration on the externals, on the letter and not the spirit of Islam. They yearned for a more personal and warm relationship with God than plain obedience to a law […]

B. H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon. Again???

    Sigh.   My late friend Bill Hamblin and I sometimes fantasized about starring someday in an autobiographical film entitled Bill and Dan’s Excellent Adventure in Anti-Mormon Zombie Hell.  So many oft-repeated arguments against the claims of the Restoration were demolished generations back but just keep coming at us.  They’re rather like undead zombies […]

Revision 5.9 “Enter the Abbasids”

    In the middle of the eighth century, a revolt commenced in far-off Khurasan, in the area of what is today Afghanistan or eastern Iran. This was an area occupied largely by non-Arabs, who resented their second-class status within the empire. The revolutionaries also appealed to the Shiites by claiming that they were acting […]

“Jesus’s Courtroom”

    A new article for Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship has gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation.  This one is by John Gee.   “Jesus’s Courtroom in John” Abstract: John Gee gives us a sketch of the divine judgment as presented in the gospel of John. “In John’s gospel, […]

Tales of the Coronavirus

    16 September 2020:  “Utah health officials report 747 new COVID-19 cases — highest daily increase since July”   17 September 2020:  “Record 911 COVID-19 cases in one day a ‘wake-up call’ for Utah: Utah governor also calls spike ‘a red flag warning’”   18 September 2020:  “Utah topples daily record with 1,117 new […]

Revision 5.8 “The Umayyads”

    The Arab expansion continued in the early years of the High Caliphal Period. Muslim soldiers moved up the valley of the Oxus River into Central Asia, and continued their march across North Africa into Morocco, where they conquered and converted the tribal Berbers. Thus, the entire northern coast of the African continent, once […]

The Book of Moses conference proceedings are already up (preliminarily, anyway)

    I hope that you were able to catch all or most of the Interpreter Foundation’s conference on Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses, which took place on Friday night and on the morning and afternoon of Saturday.  It was co-sponsored by Book of Mormon Central, Brigham Young University’s Department of Ancient Scripture, […]