Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 812

From a great chemist who died just last week

    “On the banks of the Nile, the Rosetta branch, I lived an enjoyable childhood in the City of Disuq, which is the home of the famous mosque, Sidi Ibrahim.”   “Let me put it this way: There is nothing in Islam that is fundamentally against the quest for knowledge.”      

The presidential race gets just a little bit weirder still

    “Trump leads Clinton in Utah; Libertarian Johnson surging”   However, for those who, like me, can vote for neither The Donald nor Clinton Inc., there may now be yet another alternative:   “BYU grad launches last-minute campaign for president”   “BYU grad set to launch Hail Mary bid for the presidency”   “Evan [Read More...]

“Is Islam hostile to science?”

    A very interesting interview with the outspokenly atheistic Nobel-laureate physicist Steven Weinberg:   http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ne...   Incidentally, the 1999 Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to the Egyptian-American Ahmed Zewail of the California Institute of Technology (who, sadly, died just last week), the 2015 Chemistry prize was shared by the Turkish-American Aziz Sanjar of the University of [Read More...]

“12,000-Year-Old Camp Found in Utah May Have Experts ‘Adjusting Their Theories'”

    Science is a set of disciplined approaches to a certain set or kind of topics, not a dogmatic overall worldview that’s to be passed down without change or challenge from generation to generation:   http://westerndigs.org/12000-year-old...    

In which I issue a direct personal challenge to certain critics

    Every time Dr. Royal Skousen and/or Dr. Stanford Carmack makes a presentation or publishes something arguing for the presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon, some critics instantly begin to mock them for advocating a wacky ghost-committee translation theory, a theory that is usually said to involve William Tyndale.   It [Read More...]

“Warfare and the Book of Mormon”

    As the Sunday School instructional calendar for 2016 moves toward the famous (or infamous) Book of Mormon “war chapters” in Alma, it may be an especially good time to call attention to this blog, which belongs to the Mormon military historian Morgan Deane:   http://mormonwar.blogspot.com   He gave a very stimulating presentation at the [Read More...]

At the root of our current distemper

    “If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.” Russell Kirk    

Celebrating the Interpreter Foundation’s fourth birthday

    Last night, about seventy-five officers, volunteers, and friends of the Interpreter Foundation gathered to celebrate its fourth birthday.  We had a great meal, thanks especially to Bruce Webster, a long-time participant in our scripture roundtables who has just joined our board and who, it turns out, is an expert smoker of meats.  A [Read More...]

“Woody Allen is wrong about the afterlife”

    He’s a clever filmmaker.  But, this article suggests, perhaps he’s not a really good scholar of Judaism.   Woody Allen is wrong about the afterlife    

A belated report on Friday afternoon at the FairMormon conference

    Patrick Mason was the first FairMormon speaker on Friday afternoon.  His remarks, entitled “The Courage of Our Convictions: Embracing Mormonism in a Secular Age,” seemed to draw from his recent book Planted, and were well received.  He argued for kindness and openness in our relations with those who harbor questions, entertain doubts, differ [Read More...]