Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 261

Ignorant gullibility?

    This was my 2019 Easter column for the Deseret News:   Some dismiss belief in the resurrection of Jesus as reflecting merely “the faded credulity of earlier ages” (for the phrase, see John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter”; https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpete...).  The idea, they say, emerges from a pre-scientific era, long before modern medicine, to say […]

Three who yearned for Easter

    For Easter 2017, I published this column in the Deseret News:   A decade ago, in February 2007, came the dramatic announcement that Jesus’s ossuary or “bone box” (and perhaps even his bones) had been found in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhood of East Talpiot.  Scholars overwhelmingly rejected the claim, and it’s largely forgotten today.  […]

A Great Cloud of Witnesses

    I published this Easter 2016 column in the Deseret News:   Since the appearance of the Father and the Son to Joseph Smith in the spring of 1820 and its formal organization in April 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has resounded with testimonies of the risen Savior. Notable among […]

“Cunningly devised fables”?

    I published this column in the Deseret News at Easter season in 2013.  And, yes, the book to which the column refers remains still unfinished:   Modern people commonly assume that pre-modern people were stupid, inhabiting a primitive fantasy world detached from reality, unenlightened by science, and awash in superstition.  Such gullible minds, […]

“Christ and the Work of Suffering”

    The Interpreter Foundation’s 2020 Easter message, written by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, has just appeared:   “Christ and the Work of Suffering” Abstract: Christ’s voluntary subjection to the horrible realities of this world transformed him forever. His vulnerability became his capacity to save and heal all humankind. Our own suffering develops our capacity for love, […]

Faraday and Maxwell

      Below, I offer some notes from Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), mingled with some comments of my own.  Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who has worked in both Italy and the United States […]

Designing a Temple for Dubai

    The announcement of a new temple to be built in the United Arab Emirates is still reverberating magnificently among the small community of Latter-day Saint Arabists and Islamicists.  We were, to put it mildly, both stunned and exuberant.   With his kind permission, I reproduce here a Facebook entry recently posted by my […]

“Easter’s answer to the ‘terrible question’”

    My latest column for the Deseret News:   “Easter’s answer to the ‘terrible question’: One of the most obvious facts facing human beings is the inevitability of death”   ***   New, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 15 “Filled with Love towards God […]

Against idolatry

      My wife and I continue to read a passage every night from a volume that we acquired just before Christmas — back in those nearly forgotten days when we humans used to gather together physically in order to socialize — at a book exchange party:  A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily […]

“Subscriptio” in the Book of Mormon

    I base these notes upon John W. Welch, Neal Rappleye, Stephen O. Smoot, David J. Larsen, and Taylor Halverson, eds., Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2017), 180-181:   It’s striking that, according to Joseph Smith, the title page of the Book of […]