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“This is the morning”

“This is the morning”

Last updated on: July 15, 2026 at 10:51 pm by Dan Peterson

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“This is the morning” 2026-07-15T22:51:51-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A fresco of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, from an old church in Bulgaria
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

This item went up today on the moribund website of the Interpreter Foundation: Reprint: “Panel Perspectives on Personal Views on Abraham and His Family,” featuring Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Jennifer C. Lane, Daniel C. Peterson, Gary A. Rendsburg, and John W. Welch:

“Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Thompson, Matthew L. Bowen, and David R. Seely.”

And, while I have your attention: Did you really, actually, forget to watch “Mobs to Mercies? – Becoming Brigham, Episode 25”? Really? Come on. It’s not even fully thirteen minutes long!

A view of English Bay, Vancouver (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We were obliged to disembark from the Coral Princess early this morning and were immediately thrust into the asphalt jungle of Vancouver, British Columbia, where it seems that hundreds of people aren’t actually waiting with smiles on their faces to attend to our every need. It was a rude awakening, I can tell you. We were forced to learn to navigate in and around the city in a rental car with the help, merely, of a global positioning satellite. And to find our own food. (Yes, I’ve already eaten food in the short time that has elapsed since our arrival in Canada this morning. I’m incorrigible. So sue me.)

We drove about in the hills that surround Vancouver, enjoying some wonderful panoramic views over the harbor and the bays. We spent much of our time, though, at North Vancouver’s Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, which was certainly worth the visit.

The Colorado River, near Moab, Utah (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I obviously don’t hold all Utahns responsible for this crime, let alone all Latter-day Saints. After all, the people who stopped the attack, disarmed the perpetrator, and held him down until law enforcement and emergency medical personnel arrived were almost certainly Utahns and at least some of them were likely members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But it’s still embarrassing to have this kind of a story about my adopted home state receive national and even international attention:

NBC Nightly News and Reuters: “Muslim man stabbed multiple times in Utah over his religion, police say: Muslim rights groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, ⁠condemned the incident.”

And I wasn’t pleased to see this one, either:

Deseret News: “Here’s why Utah landed on this list of 10 worst places to live: New analysis finds Beehive State a pretty great place to do business but comes up short on quality of life measures”

Now, there are certainly elements of life in Utah that could and should be improved. The state isn’t perfect. (And, obviously, it will never be perfect unless and until I’m voted off the island, shown the door, and barred from reentry. If even then.) But, on examination, it turns out that there is far less to the methodology behind this “list of ten worst places to live” than meets the eye, as suggested by an article in National Review that is entitled “CNBC’s State Rankings Are Hilarious.”

And the problem is one of long standing, as illustrated by this response to the same crew that appeared in National Review back in 2023: “Woke Bias Skews CNBC’s Rankings of Pro-Business States”

“Pythagoreans Celebrating the Sunrise” (Fyodor Bronnikov, 1869)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image

A couple of days ago, I wanted to conclude my blog entry “The Kindness Of Strangers” with a passage from the very last portion of the very last chapter of the final volume in The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis — The Last Battle. It’s a passage that powerfully expresses my conviction that death isn’t “the dying of the light” but, instead, its beginning. Unfortunately, though, the internet aboard the Coral Princess was sometimes weak and iffy, and I was unable to locate its exact wording within the time that I had allotted to myself for finishing with the blog. I’m on land now, though, and my internet connection is strong and, thus far, stable. So here is the quotation. If you’ve read all of the Chronicles through to this point, the words will, I think, be quite powerfully moving. In any event, they were so (and are so) for me:

The light ahead was growing stronger. . . .

Then Aslan turned to them and said:

“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”

Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”

“No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I once saw a poster in a bookstore in Berkeley, California — it was many decades ago now — that featured an image of Aslan the Lion accompanied by the penultimate paragraph of The Last Battle, quoted just above:

“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.

I nearly bought it. I can’t remember now why I didn’t. But I’ve never seen it again, and I’ve regretted not buying it ever since that day. The passage means a great deal to me.

Posted from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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