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Mark Your Calendar!

Mark Your Calendar!

Last updated on: January 18, 2026 at 7:52 pm by Dan Peterson

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Mark Your Calendar! 2026-01-18T19:52:53-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The 1940 theatrical poster for an earlier cinematic treatment of the subject. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

If you’re located along the Wasatch Front in Utah, or if you will be in the vicinity of Orem or Provo on Saturday, 31 January, you might want to mark that evening on your calendar. The Interpreter Foundation will be sponsoring a fireside on that date that is intended to celebrate the launch of the Foundation’s series of Becoming Brigham mini-documentaries. The fireside will take place in a stake center located in southwestern Orem, and we expect that the fireside will last for about an hour. I’m pleased to report, by the way, that we also intend to feature a small musical surprise during the program.

Actually, as you’ll see below, the first episode of Becoming Brigham will have already gone public on Monday, 26 January; further episodes will appear each Monday thereafter for at least a year and probably longer.

The horizontal “key art” poster for our new “Becoming Brigham” mini-documentary

Here is the notice that we’re sending out with regard to the documentary series:

The Interpreter Foundation is pleased to announce the release of another major media project. Titled Becoming Brigham, this series of documentary videos addresses the hard questions about Brigham Young in a faith-based, historically grounded way. With new historical resources now becoming available, and a wide range of historian interviews, this series debunks fictions and caricatures of “Brother Brigham,” and offers surprising new insights into the real Brigham Young.

Weekly episodes will stream on YouTube on Mondays starting on January 26, 2026.

We invite you to attend a special fireside about this project which will be held on Saturday, January 31, at 7:00 pm at the Orem Lakeview Stake Center: 450 West 1800 South, Orem.

Special guests will include the hosts of Becoming Brigham: Daniel Peterson, President of the Interpreter Foundation; John Wilson (Brigham Young, Six Days in August) and Camrey Fox (Emma Smith, Witnesses and Six Days in August).

I’ll share further details in the very near future on how to access the episodes of Becoming Brigham. Right now, I simply want you to be aware that they’re coming. And soon.

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)

We were filming last week in Nauvoo, Illinois, for Becoming Brigham. Nauvoo is a place that is a long way from just about everything. We flew into and out of St. Louis, which is located about a three hours’ drive from Nauvoo (and from Fort Madison, Iowa, where we lodged). Shortly after I had returned home early Saturday morning from St. Louis, my wife and I took representatives of two family generations to a matinee performance at the Hale Centre Theatre of the Disney Broadway musical version of Frozen. It was very well done and, of course — this being the Hale Centre Theatre — the staging was spectacular. (If there’s any other theater anywhere that can match the bells and whistles and technological marvels of the Hale, I haven’t yet managed to see it.) I need hardly say that a good time was had by all. There were, by the way, an unusually large number of pre-adolescent princesses in attendance at this performance of Frozen, dressed in some very beautiful princess outfits. I’m so glad that we have a good supply of live theater here in the area, and that my wife, a theater major as an undergraduate, has ensured that we see a lot of it.

The Palmyra New York Temple (LDS.org). For quite a few years, our friend and her late husband lived in the vicinity of Palmyra, where, among other things, he served as a bishop and as a member of the stake presidency.

This afternoon, we stopped briefly by a small open house at the home of a neighbor and fellow member of our ward who is celebrating her ninetieth birthday. Her late husband, a Ph.D. nuclear chemist who spent almost all of his career in government service and private industry in the East, was a friend whom I miss very much; for a while, I was his assistant in the leadership of our high priests group. It’s good to contemplate the examples set by people who have lived long, good, service-filled lives.

His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. (Matthew 25:21)

Back in 2012, the late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School (whom I first met when we were neighbors in a freshman dormitory at Brigham Young University) published a book (with James Allworth and Karen Dillon) under the title How Will You Measure Your Life? The title poses a very good question, and probably one that we should ask of ourselves more often than we do.

I’m reliably informed by one or two anonymous online critics over at the Peterson Obsession Board that my life has been dominated by, among other unsavory qualities, my perpetual and ungovernable rage and my insatiable greed. Sadly making things even worse, my rapacity and my uncontrollable anger have been blended together in a toxic stew of personal moral depravity and callous cruelty, compounded with cartoonish buffoonery. So the odds of my life measuring up at all well are virtually zero. It’s wonderful, though, to observe the lives of good and decent people. Being what I am, of course, I find them so unlike myself that they’re almost completely incomprehensible to me. Still, though, I like to see them. It’s like visiting a different planet.

The John Taylor Building, on the campus of Brigham Young University–Idaho in Rexburg
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph). Degrees earned through the BYU-Pathways program are conferred by BYU-Idaho and Ensign College.

This is one of the greatest ideas that I’ve ever encountered, and a worthy cause if ever there was one: “The BYU-Pathway paradox: Lifting at scale, one by one: As BYU-Pathway expands across the world, so too grows the ability to help Pathway students lift themselves from poverty, one by one”

No. Wait a minute. Forget what I just said. What on earth was I thinking? It’s an absolutely terrible idea. After all, it comes from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, does it not? Enough said!

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