Many people more qualified than I have commented on why the war in Iraq has been such a hard slog. I know honest people who believe that the war was at best a terrible mistake and at worst an evil conspiracy. However, I do not believe that the war was a mistake. I still think it was the right course of action. I was in favor of the war before it began and I had no illusions at that time that it would be easy, short, or wildly successful.

Aside from the debate over the motivation and justification for the war, there has been plenty of criticism about how the war has been conducted. Certainly there have been plenty of mistakes and bad decisions. However, realistically there is no such thing as a strategy or plan that can guarantee victory from the outset. Enemies are not automatons whose reactions can be perfectly calculated, anticipated, and prepared for. They are intelligent, creative people who are unexpectedly inventive and cleaver.

Winning a war is in some ways like writing a computer program. No matter how well you think you know the parameters from the outset, it is an ongoing iterative process of constant adjustment, learning, refactoring, rethinking—and it usually takes longer than you expect.

Even though I admire how much they have grown and I laud their innovative open development platform from a technology standpoint, I have avoided becoming a Facebook user for some time. It just seems so trendy.

However, I recently succumbed when a good friend, who now lives quite far away, invited me to join a Facebook group for former residents of BYU’s Foreign Language Student Resident program. The next thing I knew I was getting Facebook friend requests from all kinds of people I hadn’t heard from in years, many of whom I had met in the FLSR.

As I was setting up my Facebook profile, I noticed that one of the profile options is for “Religious Views.” As I started typing in my religious affiliation, Facebook began to suggest matching religious groups. The suggested match was “Christian – Latter-day Saints.” So I selected the suggested affiliation and saved my profile without thinking too much about it.

However, with all of the recent media attention, in relation to the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, to the question of whether or not Latter-day Saints qualify as Christians, it occurred to me that the ongoing debate between Latter-day Saints and other Christian groups on the subject may ultimately be decided not by sophisticated theological arguments, but by Facebook.

I’ve been re-reading Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling , and I just finished the chapter on the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. When reading about the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, I recognized an interesting parallel to the early Norse and Anglo-Saxon origins of English Common Law that I had not noticed previously and thought I’d write a little about it.

The Classicist bent of our modern American education system often focuses on the real, but overemphasized contribution of the Greek and Roman civilizations to our modern legal system and government while unduly minimizing or ignoring the contribution from the medieval legal traditions of the Norse and Germanic cultures from which English Common law, and subsequently American law, developed.

It is a shame that the wonderful book that is Flatland is primarily appreciated by mathematicians and physicists and virtually unknown among those who read and study literature. In addition to its interesting mathematical insights, Flatland is an ingenious socio political satire, an amazing treatment of the issues of faith and reason, a brilliant examination of prophets and revelation and how our limitations make it nearly impossible for us to comprehend things that are, nevertheless, true. It also is a discussion of the nature of God and upon what merits he is worshiped. Flatland accomplishes all of this in a fascinating fictional narrative of less than one hundred pages.