DiaBLOGue

Shortly after my family and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, three years ago, my six-year-old son invited a neighbor boy over to play. The neighbor asked if they could go geode hunting in the wooded creek behind our house. I did not know what geodes were or what kind of artillery might be required to hunt them, but I sent the boys out with my blessing, hoping they could not get into too much trouble. A little while later, I saw them staggering out of the woods, splattered with mud and clay. They were carrying a heavy rounded rock, which they dumped unceremoniously on the porch. 

Although George Darling Watt (1812–81) is perhaps best known in the LDS Church as the first convert in the British Isles, he also recorded Brigham Young’s sermons in shorthand for more than sixteen years, preserving…

Google “gay” and “Mormon” these days, and you’ll be flung— headfirst—into a veritable deluge of vitriol and sanctimony. Of course, it didn’t start with California’s Proposition 8. No, that river’s path pushes back, through the…

Lately the Bible has been getting a bum rap. Christopher Hitchens calls it “a nightmare”and blames it for much of humanity’s suffering—everything from sexism to genocide. At the same time, literalist approaches to the Bible have produced narrow theology and tendentious, unscientific speculation.

This introduction to the philosophy of religion, originally published in 1998, is fully revised and updated in the 2008 edition. The authors, Beverly Clack and Brian R. Clack are, respectively, reader in theology, philosophy and…