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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Filler vs. action engine: ‘It came to pass' carries more weight than you think
This article was first published in the ChurchBeat newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Wednesday night. Like most believers, most Latter-day Saints learn early and often how to take a joke about their faith. After all, Mark Twain made fun of the Book of Mormon in 1891, writing that if someone removed the phrase 'it came to pass' from that book of scripture, it 'would have been only a pamphlet.' When Elder Quentin L. Cook was a young college student, a university professor that he enjoyed quoted that bit of Twain in class 'with great glee,' Elder Cook said recently at BYU Women's Conference. In the footnotes of his talk, Elder Cook made some notable observations about Twain's words and how they are used against the Book of Mormon and believers. 'Each new generation is presented with Twain's comments as if it is a new significant discovery,' he wrote. 'There is usually little reference to the fact that Mark Twain was equally dismissive of Christianity and religion in general. When this kind of remark is done with humor, it is probably best to join in the amusement.' Elder Cook's story didn't end in his college class. Months later, he was serving a mission in London, England, when he met an Oxford-educated teacher at London University who took a position opposite to Twain's. Dr. Ebeid Sarofim was a native Egyptian and expert in Semitic languages who discovered the Book of Mormon by accident and sent a letter to President David O. McKay asking for baptism. When Sarofim met with missionaries, he told them that 'it came to pass' was part of his intellectual belief in the Book of Mormon because it mirrored the way he translated phrases commonly used in ancient Semitic writings, Elder Cook said. The missionaries told him it was essential to have a spiritual testimony, too, Elder Cook said. The professor gained a spiritual witness and was baptized. 'So, what one famous humorist, Mark Twain ... saw as an object of ridicule, a scholar of Semitic languages recognized as profound evidence of the truth of the Book of Mormon which was confirmed to him by the Spirit,' Elder Cook said at Women's Conference. That anecdote, which has a resolution I'll come back to, didn't fit in my original coverage of Elder Cook's talk, but it drove me to look at some of the research about 'it came to pass' over the past 60 years. The first place I went was my copy of 'Charting the Book of Mormon,' which shows that 14% of all the instances of the phrase in the 1830 edition were in 1 Nephi. So, if 2 Nephi actually were the first book in the Book of Mormon, with far fewer instances (3.5%), would the phrase stick out as much to casual or first time readers like Twain? Second, King James translators faced the same redundant phrase, which in Hebrew is ויְהִי (vay-yihi). It shows up about 1,200 times in the Hebrew Bible, which contains most of the Old Testament. Those British translators sometimes ignored it and regularly deployed a variety of expressions in its place, such as 'and,' 'and it became' or 'and it was,' according to the BYU Religious Studies Center. Still, there are 727 examples of 'it came to pass' in the King James Version of the Old Testament, the RSC reported. You can find plenty of jokes online about all of those uses of the phrase in other faith traditions, too. (The best of all, in my estimation, is the use in the title of a book on BYU quarterbacks, 'And They Came to Pass.' Yes, I own that one, too.) Of course, the same phenomenon happens in the New Testament. Just think of two famous instances in Luke 2: 'And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.' 'And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.' So, why was this Hebrew phrase so popular in Semitic writings in that age? Because it was 'an engine of narrative storytelling' in its day the same way quick visual cuts drive action movies today, BYU professor Taylor Halverson has noted. In fact, Halverson says the phrase contains a deeper spiritual driver as a representation of Jesus Christ. 'It came to pass,' he says, is built on the same root word for God, Yahweh, the source of all things and the one who drives forward the narrative of each life. 'When we read 'it came to pass,'' Halverson writes, 'we see God's presence, his love, his concern, his energy, his knowledge, his direction, his guidance.' That is certainly more challenges to Twain's suggestion that 'it came to pass' could be cut out without losing any meaning. Elder Cook's underlying message for both of his anecdotes also pointed to deeper personal action. 'Dr. Sarofim's true account is interesting,' Elder Cook said, 'but I would suggest the best approach for gaining a testimony is to immerse ourselves in the Book of Mormon so we can repeatedly experience the ongoing witness of the Spirit.' (Note: Similar to the KJV translation, the number of uses of 'it came to pass' was reduced in the Book of Mormon, too, between the 1830 and 1837 editions," according to Royal Skousen's work in 'History of the Text of the Book of Mormon.') Church of Jesus Christ begins 10-day public open house for Antofagasta Chile Temple (May 13) The pioneer ethic that is a key to thriving companies, communities and the Church of Jesus Christ (May 7) The members of the First Presidency offered their 'heartfelt prayers and greetings' to Pope Leo XIV. President Russell M. Nelson released social media posts on Mother's Day. Here's what he and other leaders said, in case you missed their Mother's Day messages. How a prayerful surgeon — Dr. Russell M. Nelson — helped ensure many joyful years for BYU coach Heather Olmstead and her family. Sheri Dew, a former member of the Relief Society General Presidency and now executive vice president and chief content officer of Deseret Management Corp. was Southern Virginia University's commencement speaker. She encouraged graduates to 'stack wins.' Two apostles and the leader of the Relief Society spoke at a BYU-Pathway Worldwide devotional and answered students questions. Church leaders broke ground Saturday for the Lagos Nigeria Temple. The First Presidency announced that the Singapore Temple groundbreaking ceremony will take place on June 28. Baseball has decreed that tainted star Pete Rose, who died last year, now will be eligible for the Hall of Fame. Here's a smart look at the issues. BYU has a new athletic director, Brian Santiago. This is what he said at the news conference where he was introduced. BYU's Jewish quarterback and Latter-day Saint wide receiver are in Israel with other team members to work out with the Israeli national football team as part of the Athletes for Israel program. This is just an enjoyable story about another terrific player with his own controversial past but a love for the game and a desire to generously share it with others.
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jane Gardam's dispatches from the past
Phoot by GL Portrait / Alamy Stock Photo In Showing the Flag, Jane Gardam's 1989 volume of short stories, the final story, 'After the Strawberry Tea', describes the troubled house move of James and Elisabeth, a couple in their mid-60s who are leaving their family home in Wimbledon for a new life in east Kent. As they load their indignant cat into the car, they have an unsettling encounter with an elderly neighbour, who warns of nuclear catastrophe on the Kent coast. Turning from the motorway into the Kentish landscape of fields and orchards, Elisabeth is overcome with thoughts of impending doom. Not long ago I followed James and Elisabeth's route down the old pilgrim's road from London to Kent. My former home was in south-east rather than prosperous south-west London, but I had lived there for 30 years, raised my child there, and although no dotty old neighbour turned up to warn of nuclear meltdown at Dungeness, I set off for my new house with an equivalent sense of foreboding. The following night, amid a chaos of unpacking, I opened a box at random and found three volumes of Gardam's great last trilogy: Old Filth (published in 2004 when she was 78), The Man in the Wooden Hat (2011) and Last Friends (2013). It was a strangely appropriate discovery: uprootings, changes of landscape and the quest for a home, for love and belonging haunt these novels, set amid the twilight of Empire and punctuated by memorial services. Jane Gardam's own death, at the age of 96, was announced on 29 April. For her admirers, her obituaries made strange reading. They dutifully reviewed her childhood in the seaside town of Redcar in Yorkshire in the 1930s, her post-war studies at London University, her marriage to a barrister, David Gardam, and her writing life, whose early promise was delayed by raising their three children. While her many literary awards were noted, the consensus was that 'she never achieved the literary acclaim of contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively' – novelists with whom Gardam had little in common, beyond a vague generalisation that they were all old ladies. But Gardam was, among her remarkable qualities, a great storyteller, whose narratives of apparently remote figures of a postwar era as emotionally distant as the Bronze Age are as plangently resonant as the human dilemmas of love and loss depicted by Chekhov or Tolstoy (when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2017, Gardam said she would take War and Peace as her book of choice). Old Filth and its two sequels are often considered Gardam's greatest works. We first encounter the octogenarian Sir Edward Feathers, the 'Old Filth' of the title, as an absence. His inappropriate nickname – he is a fastidiously groomed and distinguished old lawyer – is a hoary legal acronym for ex-pats: 'Failed In London? Try Hong Kong'. Sir Edward had dropped in for lunch at the Inner Temple, but now his chair is empty and the remaining Judges and Benchers are gossiping about its recently-departed occupant. Great advocate, they say. Had a soft life. Made a packet at the Far Eastern Bar. Good to see the old coelacanth… Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As is usually the case with gossip, some of this is true, and some spectacularly not. Filth's practice in Hong Kong has made him rich, and for decades the former British colony was where he and his wife, Betty, felt a sense of belonging, intensified by the fact that both were born in the far East. But as the end of British rule in Hong Kong approaches, Betty understands that their old age must be spent at 'home' – that term inexorably applied by British expatriates to the place where they believed their values, and their children, were best formed. And so Filth and Betty move to a prosperous village on the Dorset/Wiltshire borders where, Gardam writes, 'They put their hearts into becoming content, safe in their successful lives.' That simple sentence is fraught with jeopardy. If their lives are successful and safe, why must they put their hearts into being content? Filth's safety rests, it seems, on firm foundations: his brilliant legal career and his long marriage to sensible, sturdy Betty. But after her sudden death – planting tulips in the garden, he is unmoored. When a rapprochement with a once-loathed adversary at the Hong Kong bar ends with his death, Filth's careful detachment fragments into a chaotic quest to understand the horrors of his past. The epigraph of Gardam's novel is a quotation from Charles Lamb: 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once'. An admirer of Charles Dickens, Gardam noted that Dickens wrote on the manuscript of The Old Curiosity Shop, 'Keep the child in view'. It is advice that she takes in Old Filth, whose structure tracks the convergence of appalling childhood experience with desolate late old age, culminating in a moment of transcendent redemption. 'All my life… from my early childhood,' Filth says, 'I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.' Gardam's novel employs many of the devices of the 19th-century novel: the damaged, resilient orphan child; shattering revelations overheard, or revealed in devastating letters; benefactors in unexpected guise; the magic of coincidence and the redeeming (but dangerously frangible) qualities of friendship. Money is an urgent preoccupation, and Gardam vividly depicts the lack of agency that comes with slender means. But her technique is anything but Victorian. In Old Filth, the deforming experiences of childhood are mirrored and intercut with those of old age in vivid, filmic fashion. 'I suppose you know,' says one character, 'that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius.' 'I have no genius,' Filth replies, bleakly. As the memorial services of major characters accumulate, the minor characters ('There are no minor characters,' said Gardam) take centre stage in a trilogy whose theme is, as Gardam put it, 'The way that what happened to the child… shapes the adult forever.' 'Nobody in the swim is ever really interesting,' Gardam once remarked. But even now, when a social media presence is a prerequisite for many authors, mere name recognition is little gauge of literary worth. The value of Gardam's writing rests in less perishable qualities: her fine observation and psychological acuity, her remarkable gift for storytelling and her unforgettable depiction in these three late, great works, off how fate, chance and the tectonic shifts of world politics bruise and sustain the human heart. Related
Daily Mirror
03-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
VE DAY 80 YEARS ON ‘I helped defeat the Nazis - but I couldn't even tell my own mum'
Ruth Bourne's war work was so secretive not even her own parents knew about it - but while they saw her as a giggly teen, she was actually codebreaking at Bletchley Park. Now, 80 years on from VE Day, the Birmingham native has opened up about her historic actions. Clever Ruth Bourne's work was so secretive her mum never knew how she helped win World War II. As a teenager, Ruth was chosen to work at a top secret site, Bletchley Park, set up to decode Nazi messages. Despite admitting to being a 'giggly' teen, she took her role in the war very seriously and when her mum pressed: 'You can tell me, I'm your mother.' 'I thought; 'right if I tell my mother. It will be all over Birmingham in 20 minutes!' she told The Mirror. Winston Churchill called Ruth and her colleagues his 'special hens' who had 'laid so well without clucking'. Ruth, now 98, living in north London, kept silent about her important work until she was in her nineties and the demands of the Official Secrets Act were lifted. 'I'm proud we kept the secret. My parents died and never knew what I did. We did what we were told, you know!' she told The Mirror. 'I told them it was confidential secretarial work.' Ruth, whose dad was a doctor in Birmingham, only told her husband Stephen Bentall, in the 70s. 'I think they would have been pleased with me now. You know, now that it all came out and I've got the medals. ' In recognition of her service, Ruth was awarded the Legion d'honneur in November 2018. Ruth, whose dad was a doctor in Birmingham, had studied French, Spanish and German at school and turned down a place at London University to read languages to join up with the WRNS Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) aged 17. 'My initial application was refused. But the second time I was accepted. I was sent to Scotland to a training camp very near Loch Lomond, a little farm that had been turned over as a barracks for the training of Wrens. Everybody got a category where they were going to serve; motor transport, signalling, and they all had badges to sew on their uniform. But half a dozen of us had no badges and we thought 'what have we done wrong?'. ' The new recruits joining with Ruth in 1944, were told they had been picked for SDX, standing for 'Special Duties'. 'We thought we were going on the HMS Pembroke, we never saw the sea. We fetched up in Euston. Initially we saw a petty officer and she interviewed us and she said the work you are going to do here is highly secret and confidential so once you're in you won't be allowed out,' Ruth recalls. 'The hours are antisocial, there's no promotion, you get higher specialised pay when you are trained. If you don't like the idea you can leave now. We stayed and were then sworn in and we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. I'm told that you must never tell anybody anything you've done here, or anything you've seen or anything you've heard. ' Ruth served as a Bombe Operator at Eastcote and Stanmore and would years later return to act as a tour guide at Bletchley museum for 25 years. The Bombe machines she worked on were designed by Alan Turing to crack the Enigma code. 'A lot of us should come straight from school, girls of 17, 18 and 19 who were extremely naive. We were still silly and giggly. All we knew is we were breaking enemy codes. We didn't know the ramifications. 'We didn't know how incredibly difficult it was to break German codes. We didn't know there were 168 million, million, million possible ways.' Her work was 'repetitive but exciting' when the cry of 'job up' was heard, it meant the code had been cracked. At its peak, almost 9,000 people worked at Bletchley, three quarters of them women. Ruth remembers only a handful of Bombes when she arrived. Eventually there were more than 200. 'The only time you ever spoke about our work was when one girl might say to the other girl; 'What are you doing tonight? Sitting or standing?' We worked in pairs and it meant if she was standing you were operating the bombe. If you were sitting, you were in the checking room, operating the other machine. ' At the time she didn't appreciate how much the Bletchley codebreakers had helped with the planning of D-Day. "I didn't really comprehend the enormity of what was going on. Everything was spread out. So what you got as a bombe operator, was just a little bit of the jigsaw, we didn't get the whole picture. 'We knew where ten or twelve of the German divisions were. We did our best to make it very favourable for the D-Day invasion. We knew that the Germans believed that we were going to invade further north than we actually did. ' Ruth remembers clearly the end of the war as she celebrated with the millions outside Buckingham Palace: 'We were in Stanmore and I think it came over on the radio, 'the war's over.' We were incredibly elated and two or three of us ran out. Into the road. 'There wasn't very much traffic in those days because there was no petrol and we stopped a car, We linked arms and waved telling him 'the war's over. the war's over. Come and have a cup of tea'. We walked just up the pathway and we asked the regulating office, can we bring this civilian for tea? And we had tea. Everybody was just euphoric so all the rules were broken. 'We were kids and we happened to have a sleeping out pass and we went into London and the tube was buzzing with 'the war's over, the war's over'. Everybody was going to Buckingham Palace, so we got on the bus and we joined the crowds gathered there and somebody started up the shout, 'We want the King. We want the king'. 'And would you believe it,.eventually, the royal family came onto the balcony and they waved. Everybody waved whatever they had on to wave; gloves, scarves, hankies, coats. People climbed on the lamp posts, wherever there was a lamppost there was somebody on it. Everybody went wild. That bit I remember very well. 'There were perfect strangers talking to each other in little groups. People spoke to each other and linked hands. And then there was a Conga.' When the evening came Ruth went to Hyde Park joining a group of American soldiers who'd lit a little bonfire. 'I think they may well have used the benches or the litter boxes, whatever they could. We all sat on the grass around the fire and we sang songs, some old songs, some modern songs. Then we found our way back to our billets and I don't think anybody slept very much that night. We were all highly elated and incredibly relieved.' But after the celebrations Ruth's work continued and this time it was to dismantle the bombe machines wire by wire. 'Churchill didn't want certain people to know that we could still break into Enigma. I remember sitting out on a warm, sunny day with the soldering iron. There were five miles of wire in each bomb machine.' Ruth only found out how life-saving her work was in the 1990s. "It was only when I saw the Enigma machine at a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society that I realised the enormity of it all," she said. Ruth is now rightly proud of her female colleagues: 'I think there were approximately 1800 girls. And they kept the secret. How can you put that in your words? How important that was? "Nobody ever talks about the hens 'who were laying so well without clucking'. They are put to one side. I think the World ought to know that we were there and we were not clucking and we were only kids from school.' VE Day: 80th Anniversary Magazine Specials To commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we bring you two special special collector's magazines that look back at events that led to the end of World War II in Europe and marked a new era. In the VE Day 80: Anniversary Collector's Edition we share photographs from the street parties that were held all over Britain, while esteemed author and journalist Paul Routledge paints a picture of how the day was bittersweet, mixed with jubilation and hope for the future, as well as sadness and regret for the past. Routledge also recounts the key events of the Second World War, including Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and Pearl Harbour. The magazine costs £9.99. Also available is World War Two - A History in 50 Photographs, a definitive pictorial account of the war. Carefully chosen from hundreds of thousands of images, this commemorative magazine shares 50 exceptional photographs - including many rarely seen shots - that capture the devastating moments, horror, hope and eventual triumph of World War Two. The magazine costs £6.99.
Otago Daily Times
22-04-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Letters to the Editor: Lundy, South D and dairy
Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including the release of Mark Lundy, the future of South Dunedin and the price of dairy. Lundy parole may be but verdict still flawed Mark Lundy has been granted parole two years after he became eligible. The second guilty verdict was based on forensic evidence that expert witness Prof Stephen Bustin, professor of molecular science at a London University critiqued as ''novel, invalid, no better than pseudoscience''. This test was to prove whether the speck of central nervous tissue found on Lundy's shirt was of human origin or could have originated from eating a chop or sausage. Four immunochemical tests were undertaken and each was performed three times. Seven out of 12 were positive and the cutoff was set arbitrarily at 50%. If this test was consistent and reliable, why wasn't the aggregate of positive tests a number divisible by three? Lundy's second guilty verdict was just as flawed as his first, and was appropriately delivered on April Fool's day. Ian Breeze Broad Bay Loving it With all the images on social media over recent days showing earthmoving machinery in action at Wanaka. I take it that they are preparing the site for the long-awaited McDonald's restaurant? John Noble Mosgiel Sim city So now the council wants us to play Sim City according to their seven possible futures for South Dunedin mail-out. If you missed out on this '90s computer game, players had to manage various aspects of city life, including zoning, infrastructure and citizen needs, all the while trying to keep the city thriving and prevent disasters. One has to wonder what we are paying them to do when they want us to tell them how to play the game! Lynne Newell Dunedin Better quote perhaps? Given this Easter's weather, perhaps the quote of the day from Sir Geoffrey Palmer (ODT, 21.4.25) ought to have been 'New Zealand is an irredeemably pluvial country'. Alan Roddick Waverley Huge and wild The English poet A E Housman wrote: The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild; He has devoured the infant child. The infant child is not aware He has been eaten by the bear. When is America going to wake up? Russell Thew St Leonards Cheese and milk prices should be decreasing With the cost of living being so prominent I want to ask if we are being ripped off? Globally, as reported in Trading Economics, which tracks commodity sales, for the 2025 period to March, milk and cheese prices have decreased globally by between 7-9%. While at the same time these items increased in price to the local consumer by 9%. If our price is tied to global prices, as New Zealand producers claim, why has the New Zealand price increased, when globally it decreased? Are we being ripped off? Kevin O'Hara Dunedin Self-congratulations Since the decisive parliamentary vote to defeat the Treaty Principles Bill, I have observed with interest the self-congratulatory outpourings from those who opposed the Bill. If the parliamentary vote was indeed a true reflection of the wider public's attitude to the issues raised via the Bill, I wonder why the Bill's opponents were so determined that it should not be put to a public referendum. John Bell St Clair Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@
