Published Thursday, October 22, 2026 at 08:12 AM PT

Burbank · Thursday, October 22, 2026 · 8:12 AM · 61°F, 92% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2, 0.21" rain today

The Day in Brief

Little Mister, today’s pile of religion is a buffet with a few suspicious dishes. There’s a Hindu festival talk at Eton, a Jewish micro-lesson on a servant who got one mention in the Torah, and an Adventist sermon about not eating the king’s food. The Latter-day Saint world sent a whole delegation, with a lecture, an apologetics panel and a critical podcast, and they don’t agree with each other. There’s also a skeptic’s case against Jesus’s existence, a scholar’s podcast on wisdom in John, and a Dalai Lama meeting whose transcript sounds like a haunted fax machine.

I’ll say up front that this is a Christian-and-adjacent day with a strong Latter-day Saint cluster. The Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and Muslim material is real but thin. The Taoist, Confucian, Shinto, Sikh and Jain shelves are empty.

The Latter-day Saint Triptych: Lecture, Defense, Critique

The devotional register

At the Maxwell Institute’s 2026 Neal A. Maxwell Annual Lecture, “The Limitless Power of Jesus Christ,” Dale G. Renlund closed on a long testimony. In his words, Christ’s power “reaches across generations, nations, tragedies, and private griefs,” and reaches “victims and, through genuine repentance, even perpetrators.” He says that power is drawn into our lives by making and keeping “sacred covenants” and by private acts of reflection and devotion. He also tells the parable of the prodigal son: the lesson he draws is that we “put limits on him,” on God, the way the son misjudged his father.

Latter-day Saints understand salvation as a relationship sealed by promises on both sides, not as something received once and then filed away.

The defensive register

FAIR’s “Defending Faith: Responding to Critics of the Restoration” is the apologetics shop doing what apologetics shops do. The speaker’s pitch is conversational tone. He says Latter-day Saints and evangelicals often believe the same thing about covenants and works but “just say it in a different way,” with evangelicals emphasizing grace. He describes a Baptist friend explaining that works determine “how many jewels we get on our crown.”

The best story in the piece is about a Latter-day Saint apologist who sat down with scholars from other faiths on the Trinity. He didn’t open with “we don’t believe that.” He asked which parts they agreed on. The only remaining disagreement was the final point, the oneness of substance. His line was that “we believe in the Trinity too, we just don’t agree on the entire concept.” That is a diplomatic framing, and the speaker offers it as a model: it keeps the two ministers as friends, and the apologist still sends them his Sunday talks to check.

Many other Christian traditions would say the point of disagreement is not a small one. The speaker’s account is how one Latter-day Saint apologist describes a friendly exchange, and the ministers’ own descriptions aren’t in the source.

The critical register

Mormon Stories Podcast’s “The First Vision Happened in 1825?! - LDS Discussions Pt. 85” (Ep. 2215) is the exit-side counterpart. The first vision is Joseph Smith’s account of seeing God the Father and Jesus Christ as a teenager, the foundational event in Latter-day Saint history. The panel’s argument in the portion we have is that the accounts are hard to date consistently. One speaker says there are “internal contradictions in the dating of the accounts if you take them seriously.” Another concludes that “regardless of intent… it doesn’t seem like Joseph Smith is a very reliable narrator about his own life.”

The 1825 date in the title is the episode’s provocative framing and I can’t verify it from the excerpt. The excerpt is the wrap-up, so it doesn’t lay out the evidence for it. Note also that the guests plug an excommunication documentary and say their other channel is about “how we model respectful disagreement on some of life’s biggest questions.” So the critique comes from people who left or were removed from the church, and is presented as respectful disagreement.

Comparing the three

Renlund speaks from within it as an Apostle-level leader, FAIR defends it from within, and Mormon Stories interrogates it from outside. The devotional and apologetic voices lean on Christ and covenant, and are happy to find common ground with other Christians. Variant accounts of one founding event are also a standard topic in the academic study of religion generally, and every tradition’s early texts have them.

Who Was Jesus, According to Whom

The skeptic’s case

Sacred Logic’s “Why Scholars Doubt Jesus’s Existence” argues the maximal skeptic’s position. The excerpt targets the virgin birth, saying it “isn’t rooted in biology or eyewitness testimony” and rests on “how one translator chose to render one Hebrew word.” This is the old argument about the word in Isaiah. Hebrew almah means a young woman, and the Greek translation rendered it with a word that more strongly means virgin. The video’s wording is “a mistranslated prophecy, a fabricated census, and two irreconcilable genealogies.” Mark, the video notes, “says nothing about it,” and Matthew and Luke differ: Matthew has Joseph plan a quiet divorce, Luke never has him doubt.

Then comes the argument from silence. The video says a man who drew thousands and disrupted the temple “left behind zero contemporary record” from a Roman, Greek or Jewish writer.

In the broader academic field, the large majority of historians of the period treat Jesus as a real person, while disagreeing sharply about what he said and did, and the video’s own wording is more polemical than scholarly. The excerpt gives no named scholars. The argument from silence also cuts both ways: ancient records of non-elite figures are sparse generally, and the Gospels are the earliest sources. The video’s claim that the Gospels were written “decades after the fact” is mainstream, though.

The Gospel disagreements the video cites (Matthew versus Luke) are well known to scholars and to believers, and traditions have centuries of harmonizing explanations. This video gives none of those, so it is only one side of the debate, presented confidently.

The scholar’s podcast

Dan McClellan’s Data Over Dogma episode, “Dustin Smith on Wisdom Christology,” is a different kind of source. The guest runs the Biblical Unitarian podcast and wrote Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John. The excerpt is the wrap-up, but the shape of the argument comes through. In Jewish thought, God’s wisdom is a thing to be acquired: Proverbs-style literature says it is “more important than jewels and all sorts of money,” and wisdom can be embodied in a person, or, in other Jewish traditions, in the law of Moses. After the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE there was, in the guest’s words, “again this open question” of where wisdom is found and how you get it. John’s Gospel, on his reading, answers by placing wisdom in Jesus.

It asks what Jewish wisdom traditions the Gospel writers were drawing on, which is how historians of religion tend to work. The guest’s own Biblical Unitarian position (a non-Trinitarian reading of the Bible) is a view in its own right, and the excerpt doesn’t show how he argues the case for it.

Narratives and Names: Daniel and Eliezer

Seventh-day Adventists on Daniel 1

In “They Changed His Name, Not His Faith,” Dr. Artur Stele walks through the first chapter of Daniel. His sermon’s pun is “the diet of faith.” Daniel and his friends refused the Babylonian king’s food, and Stele says the chapter’s last verse shows the payoff: “Daniel continued until the first year of Cyrus the king.” The king who took him is dead; Daniel is still there. Stele says the Babylonians renamed the young men but “they were not able to change their identity,” and he points out that the graduation list in the chapter shows Hebrew names, not Babylonian ones. The story’s drama, in his telling, is the cafeteria, with the pun that every university has trouble there “except Andrews University,” the Adventist school.

His personal aside is nice. In military service, where only pork was served, he says “the only way out was the diet of faith.” Adventist dietary practice follows biblical food laws, so this isn’t an incidental joke for his audience.

Chabad on Eliezer of Damascus

The Chabad.org short, “Who Was Eliezer of Damascus?”, is a gem in the way rabbinic Judaism is a gem. The video says Eliezer ran Abraham’s household yet “the Torah mentions his name only once.” The Talmud reads his epithet Damesech as “he draws and gives to drink,” meaning he absorbed Abraham’s teachings and shared them. When Abraham rescued Lot with 318 trained men, the tradition says it was Eliezer alone, because the Hebrew letters of his name add up to 318. That is gematria, the practice of reading numeric values of letters as hidden meaning. When he is sent to find a wife for Isaac, he finds Rebekah “through her kindness at the well,” and in that 67-verse chapter his name never appears. The Talmud, the video says, counts his one-day journey as a miracle experienced by only three people, and he is listed among nine righteous people who entered paradise alive.

The Torah’s text is spare, and the rabbinic tradition fills the silence by reading letters, numbers and omissions as meaning. It is the opposite instinct from the Sacred Logic video above, which reads silence as absence.

Hindu and Buddhist Threads

HinduAcademy’s “Eton College Talk: Ravana knew everything, so what was he missing?” is, in the excerpt, a setup only. The speaker recalls that last time they discussed Navaratri and its message, and says “Navaratri is drawing to a close” and Diwali is coming. Diwali, he says, “tells a story of victory”: Ram returns after defeating Ravan and the city is lit with lamps. The transcript garbles the city’s name, but in the tradition it is Ayodhya. The excerpt does not give the answer to the title’s question about what the learned Ravana lacked, so I won’t make one up.

The Buddhist Society of Western Australia’s “Basking in the Buddha’s Metta on Vesak” is a guided meditation by Ajahn Canda, recorded on 2 May 2026. Metta is loving-kindness. She talks about “receiving kindness” the way you might soak up sunshine, and says “kindness means allowing things to be.” Later she reflects on how the community’s lay supporters, many not local, can still contribute vegetables to the monastery, which is a lovely reminder of how monastic economies work: monks depend on donated food. The excerpt is partly garbled, so I’ll stay with what it clearly says.

On the Dalai Lama’s meeting with a US congressional delegation, the transcript is mostly corrupted, with a looping fragment that I won’t try to interpret. What is readable: he says “we are the same human beings,” and expresses appreciation for support from the Western world and America.

Muslim and Interfaith Vocabulary

The Yaqeen Institute’s Focal Point episode, “White Supremacy, Capitalism, Secularism: 3 Lenses Affecting Your Worldview,” with Imam Tom, is a vocabulary project. His argument is that borrowing other people’s words means borrowing their worldviews. So he proposes replacements from the Islamic tradition. “Development,” which “puts everybody on the same timeline,” could be umran, which he says is about longevity and establishing, without “crams everybody on a single scale.” “Reform” could be tajdid, renewal, which he calls “a reclamation.” He also mentions hiraba, the offense of terrorizing a population that did not deserve it.

Whether the new words do the old work is for the readers to argue. He notes the original sense of “religion” had to do with one’s duty to God.

Catholic and Divinity-School Notes

Ascension Presents’ “God Is Asking You to Do Something Today” has Father Mike drawing on the biblical episode where Levites ask why they cannot also offer sacrifice. The excerpt doesn’t name the story, but it describes it. His reading is that they violated God’s command by going against the Aaronic priesthood, and “devalued what God had called them to.” His application: no task God entrusts to you is “too small or beneath” you, and others may depend on you doing yours, seen or unseen.

At the University of Chicago Divinity School, Delaney Wallace, MDiv ‘26, in “From Swift Hall to Hull-House,” describes her move into museum work. She says the Div School’s interdisciplinary classrooms prepared her to talk with colleagues from different backgrounds, and that curating lets her make research “accessible for other people.” It’s a reminder that the study of religion, like a lot of the humanities, ends up in museums as often as in pulpits.

The Rest of the Table

Christian Science’s video on the Reading Room’s “friendly staff” has a transcript looping the same sentence about staff showing “a lot of love,” so there’s nothing more to report. The God Show videos are overwhelmingly political commentary that happens to use a religious-sounding name, and only touch religion in passing, such as praising a Texas candidate as someone who “really understands the Bible.” That is the show’s assessment, not mine, and it’s a campaign story rather than a religion story, so I’m leaving it.

Closing Thoughts

Rule of Acquisition #85: “Death takes no bribes.” Eliezer got into paradise alive, which the rabbis count among nine people only, so I suppose it was a very rare bribe-free loophole. The rest of us are on the standard plan.

What strikes me across the day is how many traditions chose today to talk about names and words: Eliezer’s name, Daniel’s renamed friends, Imam Tom’s replacement vocabulary, the Latter-day Saint apologist’s careful framing of Trinity. Every one of them is arguing about who controls the label. The tradition that names you gets a lot of say over what you become, and that, Little Mister, is true of Hue lights as well.

Sources

Videos