Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 237

“A total wholeness”

    Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), the famous Swiss-American physician, psychiatrist, and author of, among many other things, the pioneering 1969 book On Death and Dying, 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 dying process, which led […]

One point clearly made by the resurrection of Jesus

    Notes from a book that I picked up in England several years ago: Daniel Clark, Dead or Alive? The Truth and Relevance of Jesus’ Resurrection (Nottingham UK: Inter Varsity Press, 2007):   First of all, a fundamentally important point:   If Jesus’ life gives a strong indication that there is someone out there, […]

Is there any place at all in the West for Islam?

    A passage in Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010) that I marked because I want to discuss this topic in the book manuscript on which I’m now working:   What is most disturbing is that we now face quite extraordinary remarks from […]

“Atheism . . . turned out to be the most irrational of the choices.”

    Sam LeFevre kindly brought the following interview with Francis Collins M.D., Ph.D., to my attention:   “‘Reason is on the side of faith … Faith works on a different plane, asking questions that science can’t answer’”   ***   I recently read an interesting article by two physicists at the Los Alamos National […]

Modeling a way of being a Latter-day Saint family on the eastern bank of the Nile

    Within weeks of our marriage in the Salt Lake Temple, my wife and I moved to Cairo, Egypt, where I wanted to shift gears quite dramatically from classical Greek and philosophy (the major fields of my undergraduate coursework) to classical Arabic and Islamic studies.  In retrospect, it was clearly a rather crazy move […]

On “shared-death experiences”

    A few days ago, in an entry entitled “Are NDEs caused by oxygen deficiency in the brain? (Part 1),” I cited a passage from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), that mentioned a phenomenon that Dr. van Lommel called “shared death experiences.”  But no explanation of “shared […]

Keeping the tradition alive through potatoes

    My paternal grandfather, who died several years before I was born, came over from Denmark as an infant.  My paternal grandmother arrived in the United States from Norway when she was roughly twenty.  Perhaps that’s the reason that, growing up, I was always more aware of my Norwegian ancestry than of my Danish […]

“She Said that they Were fastened with Rings”

    A new item — as always where at all possible, made available at no charge — has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   “Book of Moses Insights #008: Enoch’s Teaching Mission: Mahijah and Mahaway Interrogate Enoch (Moses 6:40)”   ***   Here are three passages that I marked in Ronald E. Romig, […]

A miraculous harrowing

    Here are a couple of additional passages that I’ve extracted for my notes from Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2014).  Ron Romig is a historian and archivist who is affiliated with the Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus […]

An oppressive theocracy

    I share a provocative passage that I’ve extracted for my notes from Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 117-118:   In a time of increasing domestic turmoil and foreign intervention, a group of fundamentalists seized power in a small city and established […]