If you’re new here, you may want to sign up for email alerts or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!The announcement of the building of the San Salvador, El Salvador, temple was particularly moving for me since that is where I served my mission (’00-’02). The closest temple for members in the [...]
In recent weeks I have encountered what I consider to be one of the most damaging forms of criticism of the Church. You might think that it is from all the anti-Mormon literature or propaganda. Or perhaps it is those who are so vocal as to picket the curbs at our General Conferences with signs, [...]
“The Joseph Smith Papers, Journals, Vol. 1: 1832-1839″ is available for pre-ordering at Deseret Book. The description reads:
“The Joseph Smith Papers project is the single most significant historical project of our generation.” —Elder Marlin K. Jensen, LDS Church Historian
Joseph Smith is known to history as the founder and first prophet of The Church of Jesus [...]
If you have not been able to tell, one of my top role models and mentors is Dr. Hugh Winder Nibley, former BYU professor and highly esteemed LDS scholar. He was and is still considered the foremost LDS scholar and apologist of this century, and perhaps of all time. And he was a genius. Once [...]
Someone recently asked me the following:
Perhaps you can explain how a person who finds the [temple experience] to be … troubling should express those feelings.
This was my reply, with additional edits:
Since tomorrow is Independence Day, I thought I might say a word about our Founding Fathers. We are deeply indebted to all the noble men and women who sacrificed their lives to establish this country of the United States of America some 232 years ago, and to make this country a free land. Through their [...]
As I was researching for the posts on the ankh, I came across some information which was interesting, describing the Egyptian concept of “time” and “eternity.” These concepts almost seem repetitive and redundant to our modern way of thinking, but to the Egyptians each of these terms represented something concrete and distinct, and both were [...]
(Continued from Part 2)
The ankh symbol appears frequently with several other hieroglyphics in certain formulas and invocations that immediately call our attention. These are wedja, seneb, djed, & was.
This table summarizes the different possible explanations for these hieroglyphics that I have been able to find:
(Continued from Part 1, which has been updated)
As I mentioned in Part 1, the more interesting aspects of the Egyptian ankh are not necessarily what it means standing alone, but how the Egyptians used it in their texts and illustrations.
There are three principal ways that the Egyptians used the ankh symbol, by itself, in their [...]
Egypt figures a central role in the religion of the ancient Near East, where much of our canon of scripture owes its narrative and existence to this locale. Even the Book of Mormon tells us it was written in “reformed Egyptian” (Mormon 9:32). The most interesting aspect, to me, is the adoption into Egypt of [...]
First of all I’d like to thank all those who have participated in the TempleStudy feedback that was posted yesterday. I have received a good number of responses, and most were very positive. Some even compared my methodology, albeit detrimentally, as similar to Hugh Nibley’s, for which I could not be more flattered. [...]
This LDS Gem was particularly thought-provoking this morning:
We can have eternal life if we want it, but only if there is nothing else we want more.
(Bruce C. Hafen, “The Atonement: All for All,” Ensign, May 2004, 98)
William Shakespeare once wrote a sonnet about love, probably the best-known among the 154 he wrote - Sonnet 18. I heard a beautiful song on YouTube this morning sung by David Gilmour and put to the words of this sonnet. It inspired me to write this reply:
What would thy [...]
No, it isn’t being sealed to your spouse on wedding day, although that is a prerequisite (preparatory and required) to receive this highest and most sacred sealing ordinance. The priesthood sealing powers of Elijah, as restored in this last dispensation (D&C 110:13-16) and vested in the presiding high priest of the Church (D&C 132:7), [...]
Jesse Gunther reported in an article on BYU Newsnet today about a speech given at BYU by a prominent poet:
English majors are essentially “majoring in death,” said Billy Collins, an acclaimed poet laureate in the Joseph Smith Building auditorium on Friday.
“If you have an anthology and take out all poetry on death, you would end [...]
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
