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Mark your calendar and watch your step!

Mark your calendar and watch your step!

Last updated on: January 9, 2026 at 4:04 pm by Dan Peterson

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Mark your calendar and watch your step! 2026-01-09T16:04:48-07:00 Dan Peterson

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From the famous Leningrad Codex (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I published a column in Meridian Magazine today. It’s possible that some readers may find it relatively unobjectionable: “Why Paul and Jesus Both Point Us Back to the Old Testament: The Old Testament is not an optional background for understanding the restoration. It’s a must.”

Joseph Smith (portrayed by Paul Wuthrich) working in his garden

(Still photo from the set of Witnesses by James Jordan)

An article was posted today on the Interpreter Foundation website that you might find of interest: Steadfast in Defense of Faith: “Joseph Smith and the Magical Contest,” written by the late George L. Mitton:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Steadfast in Defense of Faith: Essays in Honor of Daniel C. Peterson, edited by Shirley Ricks, Stephen D. Ricks, and Louis Midgley. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/steadfast-in-defense-of-faith/.

“An important evidence of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling can be seen through his encounters with counterfeit authority and how these encounters are similar to patterns experienced by prophets in biblical times. This essay will consider how the evil power prepared opposition to the Restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith by setting the stage for ritual (that is, magical) contests to be arrayed against the Prophet in an attempt to embarrass him and discredit the work and how Joseph beat the evil power at his own game, so to speak. Two important experiences will be considered—the encounter with the ritual of folk magic and treasure hunting and the encounter with the ritual of Freemasonry.”

“Eyes Westward” — a statue of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young that is located in Nauvoo, Illinois (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I want to remind you that the first in our series of short (roughly fifteen-minute) docudramas, Becoming Brigham, will go live online on Monday, 26 January, with a new installment appearing (absent some unforeseen problem) every Monday thereafter for at least a year but probably close to eighteen months. And, for those of you who will be or might be in the Utah Valley area on Saturday, 31 January, we will be putting on a kick-off fireside in southwest Orem that evening. I’ll have more details within a few days and will share them here and elsewhere when I can.

Karl G. Maeser, who joined the Church in Dresden, Germany, is generally regarded as the true founder of Brigham Young University. My house, at the time of the story below, was located at the foot of the hill on which BYU’s Maeser Memorial Building sits.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Once in a while, I’ve used this blog for autobiographical notes that I might eventually gather up into The Book That Nobody Has Been Eagerly Awaiting, an account of my life and times. I think that I’ll do one of those entries right now. Who knows how much longer I have to commit all of my sordid deeds, lamentable crimes, and ridiculous failures to writing? Time is passing.

One evening, when I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University and was living down at the southwest corner of campus — the house stood in what is now the expanded parking lot of the Brick Oven pizza restaurant — I walked up the street to pick up a bookcase that I had bought. (My life story might be told as an epic quest for space for my ever-growing personal library. I could have chosen a cocaine addiction but, instead, I opted for collecting books. When I point that fact out to my wife, she invariably observes that cocaine takes considerably less space than books do.) I had already paid for the bookcase; all that remained now was for me to pick it up.

It was in a house where several male students lived, but the fellow from whom I was buying the bookcase was out for the evening. That’s why I had already paid him. He told me to just go ahead and get it out of the basement.

So I went downstairs into the house’s fairly large central basement room. I had been in it several times, and I knew that the bookcase was located on the far wall of the room, opposite the staircase that I had come down. It was dark, so I tried to turn on the light. But I couldn’t find the switch. I looked and I looked for it, and finally I went back upstairs to ask where the darn thing was. Ah, they responded, in a fit of brilliant home design several decades before, the house’s builder had put the room’s one light switch on that very far-side wall, directly opposite the staircase. Which obliged the person going into the room at night to make his way across the dark room in order to turn the lights on.

No problem, I thought. There was no furniture in the center of the room, so I would just need to make my way, not even all that slowly or carefully, across the room and somehow find the switch. So I began my way across that spacious floor.

Suddenly, and to my considerable surprise, I ran into something. I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I put my hands out in front of me. What I felt seemed like a human head, which was not at all something that I had expected. It was at roughly waist level. Puzzled, I felt around a bit more. I couldn’t figure it out. Why no reaction? I could feel what seemed to be a neck, and then shoulders. It was baffling.

Now I really wanted to find the light switch, in order to determine what it was that I had stumbled onto. If it was a human, as it seemed to be, why didn’t it say something? Why didn’t it respond? Shouldn’t it have at least told me to leave it alone? Was it unconscious? If so, how was it still partially upright?

At length, I sidestepped the mysterious object and continued on my way to the wall facing me. Eventually, I located the switch and turned on the light. There was the bookcase, just where I had expected it to be. So I turned around. What was it that I had tripped across?

There, in the very middle of the room, was one of the house’s BYU-student residents. He was kneeling in prayer, facing away from the staircase that I had descended shortly before. He continued kneeling in prayer. He never did say anything. (It must have been a pretty earnest prayer!) I grabbed the bookcase — it was fairly small and not too difficult to carry — and headed back toward my own house. I never mentioned the incident to the fellow whose devotions I had interrupted — I didn’t know him well at all — and he never raised the issue with me. I hope, since his eyes were tight shut, that he never figured out who it was!

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