Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 259

On Anwar Sadat and the Fundamentalists

    I share some further notes from Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2002).  These come from pages 81-88:   The Gamaat Islamiyya or “Islamic Associations” became prominent in Egypt during the summer of 1973, just prior to Egypt’s “October […]

“The most beautiful of theories,” vindicated yet again

    Notes from Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017):   At the age of twenty-five, Einstein sends to the Annalen der Physik three articles.  Each was worthy of a Nobel Prize, and more.  Each one of the three […]

“I . . . stood in the presence of John”

    We’re familiar, of course, with Oliver Cowdery as one of the official Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.  But his role in the early events of the Restoration, and his experiences with the divine, were broader than that.  Here are some rough notes from a incomplete manuscript of mine:   A letter […]

Solar Eclipses and Terrestrial Coincidence?

    Three beautiful and related passages from Dava Sobel, The Planets (New York: Penguin, 2006):   From Earth, we see the Sun as a blazing circle in the sky, brighter but no bigger than the circumference of the full Moon.  The “two great lights,” as the Sun and the Moon are described in Genesis, […]

“Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology”

    I share, here, several quotations that I’ve extracted from John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011):   We ought . . . to think of creation in terms of functions rather than material objects.  (vii)   I posit that, in the ancient world, bringing about order and […]

“First Presidency has approved humanitarian projects in 57 countries to battle COVID-19”

    Some readers will want to add this to their Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” Files.  Others, I hope, will want to join in, where they can, in the projects described here:   “First Presidency has approved humanitarian projects in 57 countries to battle COVID-19: Church approves 110 global coronavirus aid projects, asks […]

“Kingship, Coronation, and Covenant in Mosiah 1-6”

    Here are some notes based upon John W. Welch, et al., eds.  Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork: Covenant Communications, 2017):   And it came to pass that after king Benjamin had made an end of teaching his sons, that he waxed old, and he saw […]

“I will vote for Joe Biden in November. And it will kill me”

    This blog entry is a test.  I’m curious to see how many Trumpist readers will unfriend me or write nasty notes to me because of its title, without having actually read what I’ve written.  As a matter of actual fact, I will not vote for Joe Biden this November.  Nor, just to be […]

Some notes on cosmic “fine-tuning”

    I offer here a few passages that I’ve extracted for my notes from Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009):   Since the seventeenth century, it had been widely assumed that no special initial conditions were required for the […]

Once More, on the Temple in Dubai

    I liked Charles Kurzman’s book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford: 2011) very much, and I think it an enormously important contribution.  Here’s a passage that hit me personally, describing my own personal experience quite well:   Many of us who chose to study Islamic subjects prior to 2001 […]