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 University of Aberdeen. I make no claim of originality for what follows. I’ve simply culled some things from the Wikipedia article on Maxwell that interested... Read more
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 Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “A Return to Fidelity: Princeton Professor’s Brilliant Move to Flip ‘Pride Month’ on... Read more
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 of Death,” written by Alan Goff Abstract: Modern readers too often and easily misread modern assumptions into ancient texts. One such notion is that when the... Read more
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: The name and legacy of John Knox are inseparably connected with Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh, although important events in his very dramatic life... Read more
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, at the Interpreter Foundation’s conference on “Exploring the Complexities in the English Language of the Book of Mormon”: Three common views regarding the translation of... Read more
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, is a modified and somewhat expanded version of something that I wrote in September 2022 while sailing on the North Sea toward Edinburgh: We spent... Read more
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. My reading focus was on Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Barbara Jones Brown, Vengeance is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York:... Read more
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 lives and practices medicine in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In January of 1999, she suffered a catastrophic kayaking accident on a river in a remote area... Read more
The Interpreter Foundation’s small team of filmmakers — Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, James Jordan, and Russell D. Richins — is now back in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after being out in Kisangani and Wagenya, where they had very little Internet. They spent much of Thursday at a school for the blind and went to see some of the students practicing for an upcoming “special olympics” event. Jeff promises “More on that and... Read more
My introduction to volume 56 — volume 56! — of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship has now gone up online. And, as usual, it has gone up in a variety of formats, include audible (read by y’r obt’t servant with the expert technical assistance of Tom Pittman): “In This Batter’d Caravanserai,” written by Daniel C. Peterson Abstract: In the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, based upon verses composed by an eleventh-century Persian mathematician and astronomer, the... Read more
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