Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 284

My career as a water witcher, armed with a divining rod

    Three or four times, perhaps, I’ve publicly mentioned my one and only direct experience with water witching, or dowsing, with a divining rod.  It was successful, completely against my expectations and to my considerable shock.  (See one account here.)  Although I’ve simply described what happened in my case without drawing any grand conclusion […]

The real Tower of Babel

    Bill Hamblin and I published this column in the Deseret News several years ago:   Most religions have attempted to build their sanctuaries on prominent heights to be visible to all the faithful.  Since no such natural heights were available in the flat flood plains of ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), ancient priests and […]

“Ask thy father, and he will shew thee”

    “Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.”  (Deuteronomy 32:7)   My attention was called, earlier this morning, to an article that appeared in the New York Times back on 15 March 2013:   “The […]

“‘Hard’ Evidence of Ancient American Horses’ (Part 5)”

    In “‘Hard’ Evidence of Ancient American Horses’ (Part 1),” I began to extract notes from an article about Pre-Columbian horses in the Americas that appeared in 2015, surveying the state of the question at that time:  Daniel Johnson, “‘Hard’ Evidence of Ancient American Horses,”  BYU Studies Quarterly 54/3 (2015).   I continue with that project, thinking […]

“All at once a light came down from above us”

    I’m in the process of extracting notes from a reading of Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018).   Below, I offer a reminiscence from David Whitmer that is cited by Black and Porter (on their page 143).  David Whitmer was, with […]

We’re trying to help.

    Are you aware of the range of materials that the Interpreter Foundation produces in support of teachers and students in the Gospel Doctrine classes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and, even more importantly, to support scripture study in the home?   Here are some examples.  All of this is […]

“Another Temple in Judah!” and another victory for the Book of Mormon

    One of the criticisms often leveled against the Book of Mormon is that no Jew would have built a temple outside of Jerusalem.  Yet Nephi does just that, sometime in the early sixth century before Christ:   “And I, Nephi, did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of […]

In quest of the “real” but sadly invisible Planet Vulcan

    Yesterday, in a post entitled “Day breaks over Mercury in a white heat,” I quoted a passage from Dava Sobel, The Planets (New York: Penguin, 2006), 41, rxplaining how the “discovery” of the planet Neptune by means of calculations and predictions based on “perturbed” behavior of other astronomical objects took place a full year […]

“Day breaks over Mercury in a white heat.”

    Notes from Dava Sobel, The Planets (New York: Penguin, 2006):   “I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral,” says an epigraph opening Ptolemy’s great astronomical treatise, the Almagest, “but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch earth with […]

The Palestinians: An Invented People?

    Newt Gingrich is no longer a presidential candidate, of course.  And, Donald Trump having sucked all of the oxygen out of the Republican room, he will never be again.   But this response that I wrote to something that he said years ago when he was a candidate — a response that I published […]