Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 55

“Eldr Brigham Young standing in a strange land”

  I published this article in Meridian Magazine on Wednesday, 1 May 2024.  But I have been so very busy over the past week or so that I neglected to call your attention to it:  “A Puzzling Mystery in the Last Chapters of Mark.” I hope that you might perhaps find it interesting, and maybe […]

A (temporary) limit on the redemption of the dead?

  We spent several hours in the Kirtland Temple again this morning, and then we moved over to the Newel K. Whitney store in the “Kirtland Flats.”  I was filmed in conversations in the store’s upstairs, in the School of the Prophets and in the so-called “Revelation Room.”  I doubt that those conversations will appear […]

This was the beginning of the blessing

  We drove today from Rochester, New York, to Kirtland, Ohio, stopping off to gawk for a while at Niagara Falls.  In Kirtland, we drove immediately to the onetime Kirtland home of Joseph and Emma Smith.  It was acquired some years ago by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the Community of […]

Is anybody out there interested in buying a Palmyra church?

  We were back in and around Palmyra today.  We filmed at the E. B. Grandin print shop, at the famed intersection that is marked by four large churches (strictly speaking, there are actually five, but there’s only room for four at the, well, four corners), again at the Smith family farm, and on the […]

In Harmony

  We had a long day today, including hours of driving (from Rochester, New York, to the site of early-nineteenth-century Harmony, Pennsylvania — in modern Oakland Township — and back up to Rochester).  It was mostly Casey Griffiths’s and Steve Harper’s day, but I was also there, managing to bring the quality of the discussion […]

Where it all began

  I was pleasantly surprised to run into the core Interpreter Foundation filmmaking team — Mark Goodman, James Jordan, and Russ Richins, along with their frequent collaborator Rhett Fernsten — in the lobby of our hotel this morning.  They’ve been down in Tennessee doing the final scene for Six Days in August, and I had […]

From the cradle of the Restoration

  It has been a fairly long day.  I’m back here with a film crew from Scripture Central who are working on an episode in their series A Marvelous Work. The series is hosted by Scott Christopher (who, by the way, played Peter Whitmer Sr. in the Interpreter Foundation films Witnesses and Undaunted: Witnesses of […]

Race and the Church, Reprised

  New today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:  “Review of Two New Theories about the Lamanite Mark Recently Presented in Two Different Forums,” written by Clifford P. Jones: Abstract: T. J. Uriona has offered two new theories about the meaning of Nephi’s term “skin of blackness” in 2 Nephi 5:21. […]

Marching onward and upward

  Some of the actors and crew for the Interpreter Foundation production of Six Days in August are back in Tennessee this week, working on the opening scene of the movie (which, for various quite good reasons, will actually be the last scene to have been filmed).  It turns out that filming in the right […]

On dwelling together in unity

  I would have found this remarkable at any time.  But it pleases me especially now, as open and unashamed anti-Semitism erupts on the campuses of several of my country’s elite universities:  “Jewish, Latter-day Saint friends found themselves singing together in the Taylorsville Utah Temple: ‘Chills were rising on our skin and tears were forming in […]