Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 235

“What the critics say is irrelevant, and you need not heed them.”

    It was in June 2012 — eight years ago — while I was traveling in Israel, that I was drop-kicked (via an email from the organization’s still fairly-recently appointed executive director) from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University.  The Institute, he told me, was going to make […]

“Secret Works, Oaths, and Murders,” and a Note on Comparative Topography

    Casual readers can surely be pardoned for understandably imagining that “secret works, oaths, and murders” is the working title of my biography, as my life is conceived by several of my anonymous online critics.  However, it’s not.  Rather, it’s the partial title of something new that has been posted on the website of […]

“You simply couldn’t help but like him”

    Three testimonials that I marked during my reading of Hyrum L. Andrus and Helen Mae Andrus, Personal Glimpses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2009):   S. L. Partridge was nearly seven years old when Joseph Smith was murdered at Carthage, Illinois, on 27 June 1844: Joseph’s love for children would […]

“Spelling in the Manuscripts and Editions”

    Below is a four-page statement that Royal Skousen has shared with me regarding the publication last week of part 6 of volume 3 of the critical text, Spelling in the Manuscripts and Editions. It should soon be available from BYU Studies at $49.95, if it isn’t already available.  In posting it here, I’ve unfortunately […]

A testimony from John Taylor

    John Taylor (1808-1887), a British-born Methodist preacher, was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Toronto, Canada, to which he had emigrated in 1830.  He rose to become a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, and he was present (and severely wounded) at Carthage Jail […]

“He was the most wrought-upon man I ever saw”

    Driving up here today, we paused to visit (and to take the sacrament) with my wife’s father in Bountiful and then, for the first time, to pay our respects at the graves of my great grandparents, my great great grandparents, and others of my maternal family in a small cemetery located somewhat north […]

“Science has taken on the role of mankind’s deliverer.”

    “Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right […]

176 years ago, today

    Today marks the 176th anniversary of the 27 June 1844 murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in the jail at Carthage, Illinois.  To commemorate that anniversary, I share here a column that I published in the Deseret News on 29 September 2016.  A principal source for the column wasRichard Lloyd Anderson’s classic 1981 […]

Another milestone in the scholarship on the Book of Mormon

    My wife and I were delighted just this afternoon to receive the latest massive (“oversized”) volume to emerge from Royal Skousen’s ongoing Book of Mormon critical text project:  Royal Skousen, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, Part Six, Spelling in the Manuscripts and Editions (Provo: The Foundation for Ancient […]

From a ridiculous obnoxious arrogant lunatic

    In response to something that I posted about a year and a half ago regarding Joseph Smith, a belligerent new individual appeared on my blog quite irrelevantly denouncing the use of religion “to demean, degrade, dismiss, demonize and dehumanize our fellow human beings.”   When I suggested that there was nobody on my […]