Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 89

“William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian”

    I have an anthology back home of the worst poems in the English language.  It’s one of my most treasured possessions.  Like Peter Schickele’s Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, and Kehlog Albran’s The Profit, it has brought tears of laughter to my eyes whenever I’ve opened it to sup from its pages.  So […]

“‘I refute it THUS.”

    Here’s a nice piece by Jeff Lindsay that I commend to your attention:  “Cherishing the Book of Mormon’s Teachings on the Fairness of God”   ***   I’ve posted several items recently on what is sometimes called “the hard problem of consciousness,” on the question of what subjective awareness is and how consciousness […]

Science and Religion: A Great Scottish Example

    We drove through Aberdeen today — we’ve been in Aberdeenshire pretty much the whole time that we’ve been in Scotland — and it got me to thinking about the great James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who was a Scot — born in Edinburgh — and who was affiliated for a few years with the […]

Fidelity Month

    We’re now well into “Pride Month,” so it’s perhaps appropriate to register a trio of recent dissents from the now-dominant orthodoxy. Here’s one that comes from the great Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and, incidentally, a good friend to […]

Plagiarizing Salomé?

    I published this column early this morning in Meridian Magazine:  “Prominent Lutheran Leader has “Holy Envy“ for Baptisms for the Dead”   And two new articles went up at noon today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “The Dance of Reader and Text: Salomé, the Daughter of Jared, and the Regal Dance […]

I wonder what the king is doing tonight. What merriment’s the king pursuing tonight?

    With very slight modification, the lines below were originally published in the Deseret News on 25 June 2016 as a column by William Hamblin and Daniel Peterson, based on materials that I had just read during a visit to the Cathedral of St. Giles and the house of John Knox in Edinburgh, Scotland: […]

Near neighbours to the royal family

    But, first:  It almost never happens anymore, but, well, something has gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation —  Conference Talks: “A theory! A theory! We have already got a theory, and there cannot be any more theories!”  This presentation was originally given by Royal Skousen on Saturday, 14 March 2015, […]

Revisiting a still-astonishing week, nearly forty-seven years later

    I’ve had little time during the past few days to write or to blog, which will likely continue.  And, for the moment, jet lag has left me even less mentally capable than I usually am.  So I’m intending to occasionally reuse a few prior entries over the next while.  This one, for example, […]

“O Man! Pay attention!”

    I have, I’m happy to say, finally developed a rudimentary ability to sleep on airplanes over the last few years — if conditions are precisely optimal.  So I logged a solid forty-five minutes of slumber, accompanied by several incursions into selected country and classical music, a couple of movies, and, of course, reading.  […]

Should heaven make a difference on earth?

    Mary C. Neal, MD, is an orthopedic surgeon (“fellowship-trained as a spinal surgeon”) who earned her medical degree in the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and completed her orthopedic residency at the University of Southern California (USC).  Like her husband, who is also a physician, she […]