Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 6

How high can it fly?

  Honestly, I think that some critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are deranged.  I can understand coming to the conclusion that the Church’s truth claims are false.  What I can’t understand and what I regard as very likely unhinged is jumping from that conclusion to the further conclusion that absolutely […]

Padre no me arrepiento

  “Why God Placed Adam and Eve Under Paradoxical Injunctions: A View of the Garden Scene through the Optics of Communication Theory,” written by Jared Balmer Abstract: This paper investigates the pragmatic aspect of communication between God and our first parents while in the Garden of Eden—the psychological impact of placing them under contradictory injunctions […]

Men and Women and Girls and Boys, etc.

  Thursday is our day at the website of the Interpreter Foundation for posting reprints of book chapters.  Today is Thursday, so we’ve posted the reprint of a book chapter.  Please note that today isn’t Friday.  But Friday is the day on which we publish new articles in the Interpreter Foundation’s journal.  I spell this […]

Shall we not go on in so great a cause?

  A new article of mine has gone up in Meridian Magazine:  “Brigham Young, Race, and Slavery: Reexamining Utah’s 1852 Service Act.”  If you can bear to do so, please feel free to take a look at it. Also on the subject of Brigham Young, we were back again today in the Pioneer Memorial Museum […]

Good and Faithful Servants

  On Sunday night, at the recommendation of friends, my wife and I watched a film titled The Way.  Telling the story of several people who are walking the famous pilgrimage route Camino de Santiago, it was directed by Emilio Estevez, who appears in it himself at several points, and it stars his father, Martin Sheen. […]

From the desk of an intellectually bankrupt Mopologist

  Up today on the immutable and unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation: “The Interpreter Foundation Podcast — August 14, 2025: Plausibility Structures, Intellectuals, and the Church’s Truth Claims; The Interpreter Foundation Birthday Party During the 14 August 2025 episode of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, our hosts Terry Hutchinson, Kevin Christensen, and Mark Johnson discussed […]

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

  “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to […]

In which I once again object to certain rhetoric

  On Wednesday last, I posted a blog entry (“On Dealing With “Scum” Who’ve Entered Our Country Illegally”) in which I took issue with an ostensible Latter-day Saint over at the “LDS Freedom Forum” who calls himself “Fred.”  I objected to his use of such terms as scum to refer to illegal immigrants to the […]

I can easily imagine worse deaths

  Two new articles went up today on the perpetually unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation.  The first of them is “Death by Chocolate: Considering the Wine Imbibed by the Lamanite Guards,” written by Noel Hudson Abstract: This article examines two instances in the Book of Mormon in which captives escape through the negligence of […]

A great American thinker on dogmatic scientific orthodoxy

  Posted today on the static, never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation:  “Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Paragraphs and Verses in the Scriptures,” written by Kent P. Jackson: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Studies of the Book of Mormon, Bible, and Temple in […]