When the great seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal died at the age of just thirty-nine in 1662, his servant found a small piece of parchment that had been sewn into his coat.

“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” quipped the famous American writer and “muckraker” Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), “when his salary depends on not understanding it.”

Hugh B. Brown wrote, "We should be in the forefront of learning in all fields, for revelation does not come only through the prophet of God nor only directly from heaven in visions or dreams."

Latter-day Saints are scripturally obligated, in my judgment, to support the gathering of Israel. But we are not obligated to support any particular policy of the United States toward Israel, let alone any particular policy of Israel itself.

Hingson argues that the connection between temples and physical bodies is more than just metaphor, with bodies able to be literally classified as temples according to various scholarly criteria.

“Can there be any valid criticisms of the Church?” I’ve posted a response to the challenge at least twice, and I’ve been attacked each time for what I wrote, by people who plainly didn’t understand what I wrote and, it seems, couldn’t be bothered to try to understand it.

I’ve recently read several German-language books, including Anton Grabner-Haider and Peter Strasser, Hitlers mythische Religion: Theologische Denklinien und NS-Ideologie (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2007). I actually have mixed feelings about the overall thesis of the book.

On May 21, 1991, I called my friend Dr. Ioan Petru Culianu at his office at the University of Chicago to discuss a project he wanted to collaborate on with me. His secretary answered. "I'm sorry," she said, but he was murdered earlier today."

The Book of Mormon offers at least two really good examples of such ancient simile oaths or simile curses.

I think that the image is serving for many as a kind of Rorschach test, and that their responses probably tell us more about them than about the person in the portrait.