Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 60

An Appropriate and Defensible Etymology for “Cumorah”?

  As discomfiting as it certainly is to our critics, the Interpreter Foundation continues to produce materials for the Latter-day Saints and for any who are interested in the Restoration, and to do so at an alarmingly non-glacial pace.  Here are the most recent publications from the Foundation: “Second Nephi as a Legal Document,” written by […]

Notes on the Origin of New Zealand

  We began the day with almost all of our group taking a multi-hour minibus tour of mostly eastern Sydney, looking at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the magnificent Sydney Opera House and including really good fish and chips and shrimp, followed by gelato, at Bondi Beach. As I sit down to commence writing this […]

An apology for my travels

  Amazingly, something new has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation!  It is “Conference Talks: Consecration and Sacrilege in Early Rabbinic Judaism” Avram Shannon spoke on “Consecration and Sacrilege in Early Rabbinic Judaism” at the fourth Temple on Mount Zion Conference, held on Saturday, 10 November 2018 in the Tanner Building at Brigham […]

Of Martin Harris and “Spiritual Eyes”

  Just in case anybody is out there who (a) might be interested and (b) is or will be in the vicinity of Sydney, Australia on the relevant date:  It seems that I’m likely to be doing a fireside there on Thursday, 22 February 2024.  I’ll try to post confirmation of this in the next […]

Immanuel Kant, Mark Twain, and Clairvoyance

  On the flight from Honolulu to Sydney, I watched the 2015 film In the Heart of the Sea, about the disastrous final voyage of the Nantucket whaling ship Essex, which served as the inspiration for Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick.  The movie was a box office bomb.  I honestly don’t know why that […]

Richard Bushman on witnesses to the Book of Mormon

  Here are some notes about certain of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon — both official and unofficial — that I’ve drawn from the fourth chapter of Richard Lyman Bushman’s book Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023): Emma viewed herself as one who had never left […]

Puʻuhonua

  I sometimes encounter the complaint from some atheists that they don’t even desire immortality because, they say, eternal life would be unendurably boring.  I don’t take the complaint very seriously.  On any given day, if I were to be told that I could choose between my life ending at midnight, on the one hand, […]

Pre-Columbian contact between South America and New Zealand?

  The standard view of the origins of the Polynesians, and specifically of the Māori of New Zealand, is that they derive from the Lapita civilization of Melanesia and Micronesia.  Here is a passage from Māori History: A Captivating Guide to the History of the Indigenous Polynesian People of New Zealand (2022), apparently written by […]

For Groundhog Day

  “Temple Themes in the Book of Abraham,” written by Stephen O. Smoot Abstract: The Book of Abraham is replete with temple themes, although not all of them are readily obvious from a surface reading of the text. Temple themes in the book include Abraham seeking to become a high priest, the interplay between theophany […]

The Book of Mormon and then-prevailing notions of scripture

  Conference Talks: The Symbolism of the Cupped Hand in Ancient Egypt and Israel: Iconography, Text, and Artifact, presented at the Interpreter Foundation’s 2018 Temple on Mount Zion Conference by Stephen Smoot Stephen Smoot spoke on “The Symbolism of the Cupped Hand in Ancient Egypt and Israel: Iconography, Text, and Artifact” at the fourth Temple […]