Islam

Sunstone Testimonies 2015

I’m a few weeks late with my recap of Sunstone.  The one thing about Sunstone is that you can find all kinds of different sessions, both pro and anti church.  People seem to concentrate on the anti-church presentations, but there are some others I would like to talk about.  The people I have highlighted below […]

Posts Restored – Back to the Present

Many of you have noticed a blast from the past on my blog.  Back in Feb 2013, my host server crashed and I had to back up my blog and try to restore it.  I picked WordPress.com, thinking that was a good choice.  Well, it didn’t restore all my posts–I was missing about 150 of […]

Utah’s model of Anti-Discrimination and Religious Rights

A recent law passed in Indiana has put the state in an unusual spotlight.  Proponents claim that their law uses essentially the same language as the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that passed with near unanimous support.  However, one thing Indiana has done that the federal statute did not is expand the reach of the religious […]

Is ISIS our generation’s version of Nazis?

Edmund Burke was an Irish political philosopher, Whig politician and statesman who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism.  His most famous quote:  “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” How involved should the U.S. be?  Hitler invaded Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1939, and […]

How do you feel about School Prayer?

[poll id=50] Please answer the poll question before you continue on to the rest of the post.

Honeymoon Problems

Samira and Firas are a Muslim couple married in August 2009.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been watching the TLC program, Strange Sex (also available on Netflix.)  For Firas and Samira, it was love at first sight.  One week after meeting, Firas asked Samira’s father for permission to marry. Muslims have even […]

Mormon Missions in Islamic Countries

Many of you have read Lengthen Your Stride by Edward Kimball.  It’s a great book in an of itself, and it includes a CD with a treasure trove of material.  Included on the CD is a much longer version of the book, but few people read the “long version.”  Edward Kimball and Deseret Book disagreed […]

A Mormon View of ‘The Lost Symbol’-Dan Brown

For my birthday, my wife gave me Dan Brown’s newest novel, The Lost Symbol.  I don’t typically read novels–I prefer sports, history, religion, or biographies–but I read The DaVinci Code and loved it.  Angels & Demons was pretty good.  I had heard rumors that Dan Brown’s book was going to deal with Masonry and Mormonism, […]

Jewish, Muslim, and Academic Perspectives on Abraham

I’ve been talking about doing a post about Abraham for a long time. People often reference Abraham when talking about things like Joshua’s Unholy War, the Priesthood Ban, or polygamy. Usually the reference is to the sacrifice of Isaac. So, this post is to serve two purposes: (1) to show some different perceptions about the […]

Nahom-Archeaological Evidence of Book of Mormon

After Lehi’s family left Jerusalem, they traveled in the Arabian Peninsula on their way to the “promised land.”  In 1994, an archeaological discovery in Yemen has the same name as mentioned in 1 Ne. 16: 34, “And it came to pass that Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom. Critics […]