Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 263

Shared Delusion?

    I offer another note taken from Andrew Sims, Is Faith Delusion? Why Religion is Good for Your Health (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).   But, first, I need to point out that his use of the name Joseph Smith here is probably not significant.  For one thing, of course, the Prophet Joseph […]

Entering Holy Week

    The late Bill Hamblin and I — how it still surprises and grieves me to write that phrase, “the late Bill Hamblin”! — published the article below in the 19 April 2014 issue of the Deseret News:   Historically, Easter has been the most important Christian holy day, as well as the oldest. […]

Science and Health, with No Reference to Mary Baker Eddy

    Some while ago, I read Andrew Sims, Is Faith Delusion? Why Religion is Good for Your Health (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).  Dr. Sims, who taught for many years as a professor of psychiatry in the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, was founder-editor of Developing Mental Health and, for ten […]

A visit with the Great Spirit in pre-1847 “Utah”

    From Lee Nelson, Visions from Beyond the Veil (Springville, UT: Council Press, 2014):   In doing research for a biographical novel on Walkara, a Ute Indian chief, I uncovered what appeared to be a classic out-of-body experience.  Walkara told the story to early trappers and later to the pioneers who settled in his […]

The sunset of Arab nationalism

    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).   The first simply makes a point that I too want to remember to make, and to expand upon, in a book that I’m writing:   […]

World Views and World Models

    I’ll be working my way through John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011).  At the time he wrote the book, Dr. Barrow was a professor of mathematical sciences and the director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at […]

“Now If This Is Boasting, Even So Will I Boast!”

    “Interpreter Radio Show — March 29, 2020” You can now listen to the 29 March 2020 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show at your convenience and free of charge, shorn of commercial and other breaks.  The participants on Sunday, 29 March 2020, were Martin Tanner and . . . well, I guess I […]

“Backward in time”

    Still working my way into Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, 2d ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011):   The relevance of quantum mechanics is, in a sense, more immediate than Copernican or Darwinian ideas, which deal with the far away or long ago.  Quantum theory […]

Blackening Martin Harris’s Reputation, Post-1830

    From Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018), 252-253:   While the principal target of Painesville [Ohio] Telegraph editor Eber D. Howe’s 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed — the father of all anti-Mormon books — was plainly Joseph Smith, Martin Harris was a “close second.” […]

Afghanistan as a Jihadi Turning Point

    It’s time for me to begin extracting notes from certain Islam-related books in order to move forward with a substantial and much-delayed writing project of mine.  I begin with Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2002).  At the time […]