Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 276

“I still had hands, and feet, and a body”

    I’m drawing material here from Brent L. Top, What’s On the Other Side: What the Gospel Teaches Us about the Spirit World (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012):   Modern revelation teaches us that “the spirit of man [is] in the likeness of his person” (D&C 77:2).  In 1909 the First Presidency stated that the […]

Against our sovereign myth?

    The LDS Film Festival 2020 opens next week.  It will run from Monday, 24 February 2020, through Saturday, 29 February 2020, at the SCERA Center for the Arts in Orem, Utah.   ***   One of my great regrets is that I’ve never, thus far, been able to attend RootsTech.  Unfortunately, I have […]

“Who Is Leaving the Church?” (Part One)

    Here are some notes from Stephen Cranney, “”Who Is Leaving the Church? Demographic Predictors of Ex-Latter-day Saint Status in the Pew Religious Landscape Survey,” BYU Studies Quarterly 58/1 (2019): 99-108:   Dr. Cranney, a researcher based in the Washington DC area who holds a dual Ph.D. in sociology and demographics from the University […]

A Blast from the Past: “Blasphemous Art in Brooklyn Stirs Controversy”

    I published this little item in the Provo Daily Herald back on 20 October 1999.  Considerable history has come and gone since then.  For example, Rudy Giuliani became “America’s Mayor” a little less than two years later amid the catastrophes of 9-11 and, since then, has become a national embarrassment:   Blasphemous Art […]

“The Hermit and the Cat”

    I would like to call your attention to the   LDS Film Festival 2020   which opens next week.  It will run from Monday, 24 February 2020, through Saturday, 29 February 2020, at the SCERA Center for the Arts in Orem, Utah.   ***   I share with you yet another nice little […]

Was I the last to know?

    I really hope that this idea will come to fruition:   “Utahraptor State Park would protect discovery site of Utah’s namesake dinosaur: Lawmaker seeks $10 million to establish Utah’s 45th state park, conserve world-famous fossil treasure trove”   ***   “Climate change is slowly drying up the Colorado River: Average annual water flow dropped more […]

“First Visions and Last Sermons”

    It being Friday, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship has published yet another new article.  This one is by Val Larsen:   “First Visions and Last Sermons: Affirming Divine Sociality, Rejecting the Greater Apostasy” Abstract: There is a kinship between Lehi and Joseph Smith. They are linked to each other by similar first visions, and […]

Still going!

    The Interpreter Foundation continues to produce, and to make its products available at no charge or, in the rare cases where it’s necessary, at cost.  Here are some of the most recent things to appear on the Foundation’s website:   Teachings and Testimony of the First Vision: Elder Joseph F. Merrill Teaches and Testifies […]

“The most convinced and convincing Christian writer of his generation”

    I published this column in the Provo Daily Herald on 28 July 1999:   During a rambling, all-night discussion in the late 1960s, a famous Nobel laureate physicist told a group of college students that, though he loved C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novels, he hated the “religious propaganda” that Lewis tacked on […]

The religious transformation of Latin America

    The numbers need updating, of course, as do some other elements of the article, but the basic point of this column, which I published in the Provo Daily Herald back in 1999, not long after a trip to South America and another to southern Mexico and Guatemala, still holds:   While many in […]