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Heavenly and Earthly

Heavenly and Earthly

Last updated on: January 6, 2026 at 10:32 pm by Dan Peterson

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Heavenly and Earthly 2026-01-06T22:32:41-07:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A group of patriotic tourists express their support for a Capitol policeman on 6 January 2021.

First of all, I hope that everybody out there had a wonderful National Capitol Tourism Day. The sixth day of January is also Epiphany, the last of the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas, for those who may care about such things. You were free to celebrate it, too, if you chose do so.

Maximilien Luce, “Le bon samaritain” (1895); Wikimedia Commons public domain image

I would like to call your attention to Emmaus Road Media, which is run by good friends of mine. They have done, and are doing, some good film work.

The 1928 cover of Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion,” one of his more important treatments of religious belief
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Is America really experiencing a religious revival? One of the foremost authorities on American religiosity weighs in on that question: “Perspective: What the data really says about religious revival and Gen Z: The reversal of a trend would require a transformation unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times”

An aerial photo of Greenland by buzzard525. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I hesitate to bring up politics again on this almost entirely apolitical blog. It will be the second time in three days. But I think that I probably ought to say something about the possible acquisition of Greenland by the United States of America, which could potentially occur any day now (or never at all). By the time you read this, American boots may already be on the ground in Nuuk and perhaps even in Copenhagen:

I would be fine if Greenland were to formally join the United States.
I would be happy if Denmark were to agree to sell Greenland to us (at a mutually agreeable price) and/or if the people of Greenland chose to apply for admission to the United States.
I see no compelling reason, though, for the United States to own Greenland. We’ve already had an Air Force base there for seventy-five years. (It’s now become a Space Force base.) I have little doubt that we could have another half dozen such bases there, if we asked nicely. And maybe a naval base or two. They would certainly be substantial boons to the local Greenlandic economy, providing income that transcends even shrimp and halibut.
We have numerous military bases in countries (e.g., Germany, South Korea, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.) that we neither own nor control.
Greenland holds significant untapped mineral wealth, including vast deposits of rare earth elements (REEs), graphite, copper, nickel, zinc, gold, iron ore, lithium, uranium, and diamonds, including substances that are crucial for renewable energy technology (EVs, turbines) and electronics.
However, we don’t need to own Greenland in order to obtain those minerals. Seizing a foreign country in order to extract its natural resources and raw materials is not a free-market approach, it’s a holdover from the days of imperialism and colonialism. We should seek to obtain those minerals, if we want them, by means of free and voluntary exchange.
Greenland would be a rather odd fit for the United States. For one thing, its official languages are Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) and Danish, with Greenlandic or Kalaallisut being the primary language for most residents. Would Kalaallisut and Danish become official languages of the United States? Do we have any states (beyond Alabama, of course) where the dominant local language isn’t English?
Greenland would certainly make for a very curious state: The island has a surface area of about 836,000 square miles, making it three and a half times the size of Texas. The least populous of the current United States is Wyoming, which has about 600,000 residents. By contrast, Greenland has a total population of between 56,000 and 57,000 — most of them, remember, speakers of Kalaallisut.
I strongly oppose any military annexation of Greenland. To invade a NATO ally would be a catastrophic error that would change history in unforeseeable but predictably disastrous ways.
I do predict, however, that Vladimir Putin would be delighted. And, come to think of it, maybe that’s reason enough for a nice little invasion.

A balmy day in suburban Greenland (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

A few months ago, I read Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). I think that one of the points that he makes, about the tangible materiality of Joseph Smith’s claims regarding the plates and the Book of Mormon, is vitally important. Here are three passages on that theme:

The plates entered Joseph Smith’s life as a peculiar mixture of the heavenly and the earthly. On the one hand, they were a gift from heaven. Smith said that he learned of them from an angel and translated them “by the gift and power of God.” On the other, the plates were thoroughly earthly, buried in a stone box on the side of a hill. They had size, color, and weight; Smith said that he sprained his thumb carrying them home. The combination made the plates a hybrid, both material and spiritual, standing at the line between the human and the divine. (xi)

As his account made clear, the plates were both of the earth and of heaven. They were mundane, material, historical, on the one hand, and divine, mysterious, holy, on the other. (4)

In Joseph Smith’s account of getting the plates, a glorious angel appears out of heaven and tells him about their location. He wears robes of “exquisite whiteness” and stands in the air, his feet not touching the ground. When he leaves, the angel ascends through “a conduit open right up into heaven.” But this luminous being does not bring the plates with him as he presumably would if the plates had been stored in heaven. Instead, Smith has to walk to the hill, scrape away the dirt, use a lever to elevate the stone, and exert himself to lift the plates out of the box where they had lain for centuries. When he finally gets the plates, he has to lug them home—dislocating his thumb when an assailant attacks him—and find a box to store them. Their materiality is emphasized in nearly every detail of the story. The object he carried home was both holy and ethereal and earthly and material. (4)

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