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Never to Be Forgotten

Never to Be Forgotten

Last updated on: February 18, 2025 at 12:46 pm by Dan Peterson

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Never to Be Forgotten 2025-02-18T12:46:59-07:00 Dan Peterson

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A monument erected (by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’m told) at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in southern Utah
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I continue my incessant whining about the hit Netflix miniseries American Primeval by calling attention to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune that you may be able to access. It was published on Sunday, and it’s titled “Commentary: To learn the real lessons of history in ‘American Primeval,’ we need the real story: Reducing peoples from the past to simple caricatures won’t help us answer the hard questions.” The article was written by Janiece L. Johnson, who is also the author of the award-winning Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and a co-editor, with Richard L. Turley Jr. and LaJean Purcell Carruth, of the two-volume The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Complete Legal Papers (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). She has some relevant knowledge.

The third of the three temples currently located in Scandinavia is this one, just outside of Helsinki, Finland. The other two are in Sweden (where the temple is currently under renovation) and in Denmark. A fourth temple has been announced, this one for Norway — which would have delighted my father. (LDS.org)

On Saturday, we had a mostly potluck dinner with a large group of friends — some of them former colleagues in Brigham Young University’s Arabic program — whose common denominator is one-time membership in the Latter-day Saint branch in Cairo, Egypt. These friendships have lasted for decades. Unfortunately, two of our number have passed on, and we all miss them very much. We have many happy memories.

On Sunday morning, my wife and I hosted a couple of Finnish friends for brunch at our house, and then took them to church with us. I’ve stayed with them in their home just outside of Helsinki. They are great people, who have been pillars of the Church there and in surrounding countries (e.g, in Russia and Estonia), as well as in Saudi Arabia (where she served as a dean in one of that country’s universities). They’re not long back from a senior mission to Kuwait.

And this morning we had breakfast with friends who are visiting from Indiana. Looking back, it’s gratifying to think of the great experiences that we’ve had and the very good friends that we’ve made across a wide range of areas over the years. I have to say it now: It’s been a good life, all in all.

The Hale Centre Theatre, in Sandy, Utah, is (as I’ve often said before and will certainly say again, barring unforeseen catastrophe) a local, state, and regional treasure. (Photo from the Hale Centre Theatre website)

Tonight, we gathered with a relatively large group of longtime neighbors and friends for dinner at Slackwater Pizzeria in Sandy. I had never heard of the place before, and I had no idea what “slackwater” might be. It turns out that slack tide or slack water is the short period in a body of tidal water when the water is completely unstressed, when the tide is turning but hasn’t yet quite turned and there is no movement either way in the tidal stream. Why they chose that name I have absolutely no idea whatever.

I confess that I didn’t avail myself of any of the craft beers at Slackwater. Nor, for that matter, did any of the others at our long table. But the pizza was really quite good. Some of the best that I’ve had in quite a while. (I’ve been losing my taste for pizza for a while now, because most of what I’ve had in the past couple of years hasn’t been very good. But Slackwater’s was good.) The place was crowded tonight, perhaps a little unusually so because today was a holiday. However, the service was good and efficient, so the crowd wasn’t a problem. If you like pizza, I recommend the place to you.

After the play, we all headed over to the Hale Centre Theatre for a performance of Little Women, a musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel of the same name. It was, as we always expect of the Hale theaters, very well done.

Reports indicate that public life on Manihiki Atoll (shown here in a NASA public domain aerial photograph) comes to an absolute standstill during the weekly “Interpreter Radio Show.” Shops and restaurants close, factories shut down, cows decline to give milk, school is suspended, courtrooms are vacated, public transportation (including subways and monorails) pauses, and police and physicians and ambulances are unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Newly posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Interpreter Radio Show — February 9, 2025, including Doctrine and Covenants in Context: D&C 19

For the 9 February 2025 episode of the Interpreter Radio Show, the regular discussants — Terry Hutchinson, Kevin Christensen, and Mark Johnson — were joined by special guests Grant Hardy (first hour) and Dan Peterson (second hour). They discussed Grant’s book, The Annotated Book of Mormon, and Come, Follow Me Doctrine & Covenants lesson 10. Due to technical difficulties, only the first 20 minutes of the first hour were recorded.

You can listen to or download the surviving portions of the 9 February 2025 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show at the link above. They have been edited to remove commercial breaks.

The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard on Sunday evenings, every week of the year, from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

The loss of two-thirds of the first hour points to a challenge that we will need to address. I actually participated during the second half of the first hour as well as in the second hour and — trust me on this — my contribution was unparalleled in its depth, brilliance, and eloquence. Unfortunately, my peerless remarks are lost forever, so you’l need to take my word for their high quality.

And this, too, has now gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Elder Mark E. Petersen on the Creator/Creation and the “Race of God,”” written by Dennis B. Horne

[Editorial note: The information in this post is an overview of Elder Mark E. Petersen’s (and others’) teachings and experience and may not necessarily represent official Church understanding. The current information is found on a fairly recent Church History Topic on “Organic Evolution.” It can be found here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution?lang=eng]

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