Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 63

Having a look at some of the demigod’s handiwork

  Newly posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Nibley Lectures: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 8 “O How Great the Plan of Our God!”:  2 Nephi 6-10 During 1988, 1989, and 1990, Hugh Nibley taught Honors Book of Mormon classes for four semesters at Brigham Young University. The lectures were video-taped […]

Missing Auckland

  We missed Auckland today.  A mechanical problem with one of our ship’s lifeboats — which was used as a “tender” to transport passengers in the Bay of Islands — prevented it from being raised back into position for departure.  And, of course, the ship was not allowed to set sail without its full complement […]

Change and Failure to Change

  My friend Professor Louis Midgley has had a life-long love affair with New Zealand and, being here once again, it’s very easy to remember and to understand why. We arrived today at the Bay of Islands, on the northeastern coast of the North Island.  Most specifically, our ship dropped anchor just off Waitangi, where […]

“They thought they knew what they were dismissing”

I return briefly to Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s posthumously-published 2008 book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, which I recently re-read while flying over the Pacific.  And, just to refresh memories, I again cite here the brief bio that appears at the end of that volume: Known as Lisby by […]

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 […]