Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 6

It’s rapidly approaching, and I’m not ready

  I’m trying to find the time to get my remarks together for the upcoming FAIR conference, which I’m scheduled to deliver in the concluding session, I believe, of the final day, on Friday, 8 August.  But it’s genuinely difficult.  (Last night, for instance, watching K-Pop Demon Hunters with an element of my progeny cut […]

I’m going to die. So are you.

  A new article of mine has just appeared today in Meridian Magazine:  “Facing the Silence: Why is it So Difficult to Talk about Death?”  It’s partly my way of announcing that I’m likely to pass away sometime, sooner or later, within the next several decades.  Maybe even today.  Some will want to buy their […]

An atheist in “The Twilight Zone”?

  It’s at times like this, when we’re acutely aware of our powerlessness to do anything meaningful to help, that we most starkly realize our desperate need for the only one who actually can help us: “The Words of Christ Bring Comfort and Hope to Grieving Families and Friends in Lesotho: Church and government leaders join […]

Did the Berner Oberland help to end slavery?

  I think that I may actually have been credited, the other day on the Peterson Obsession Board, with having invented the notion of a limited geographical model for the Book of Mormon — having done so, I suppose (because it’s the only reason for which I ever do anything), with an eye toward massive […]

“The Plates of Gardner”

  This new review-essay appeared today in the never-changing Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “The Plates of Gardner,” written by Kimberley Heuston: Review of Brant A. Gardner, The Plates of Mormon: A Book of Mormon Study Edition, and its companion volume, Engraven Upon Plates, Printed Upon Paper: Textual and Narrative Structures of […]

An Application of Ockham’s Razor to Apologetic Motivations

  It’s Thursday at the Interpreter Foundation, so here’s a chapter reprint for you:  Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Manipulating Text to Reinforce the Message: Content informs Form in the Bible and Book of Mormon,” written by my long-time friend Paul Y. Hoskisson Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in […]

Dang it, we ran out of time

  So near and yet so far.  We didn’t have enough minutes to do Yellowstone even approximate justice today; this has been, for at least two of us, a working vacation, one of whom has fixed hours of employment geared to a different time zone.  So the eventual choice today wasn’t to go into the […]

A Tale of Two Temples

  Come, Follow Me — D&C Study and Teaching Helps (2025): Doctrine and Covenants 81–83: July 21 – 27: Where “Much Is Given Much Is Required” Jonn Claybaugh has contributed yet another concise set of helpful notes to the Interpreter Foundation for teachers and students of the Come, Follow Me curriculum of the Church of […]

Slowly deemphasizing, allegorizing, the Book of Mormon?

  Every once in a while, I encounter the claim from some former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that leaders of the Church are quietly, gradually, stealthily moving Latter-day Saints toward acceptance of the notion that the Book of Mormon is merely “inspired” fiction of some sort.  Perhaps an allegory. […]

High Thoughts, Shared Among Friends

  This is the abstract that I sent in this morning for the 2025 FAIR Conference, which will run from the evening of Wednesday, 6 August, through Friday, 8 August, at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah.  I will be speaking on Friday: “Brigham Young and Slavery” We cannot hide the fact that Brigham Young said […]