Brad Mathews, Author

Category: Religion

  • Congratulations on Waking Up! Now Go Back to Sleep

      Today I would like to share a personal story, and it is one I find myself thinking about more and more in these trying times. I used to wander aimlessly, sometimes subtly certain that I was on the right path, even as it slithered deeper into the shadowy woods where every tree looks the…

  • Manufacturing Fear

    On the NASA Voyager mission in 1977, Carl Sagan curated content for a golden record that was affixed to the space probe, which would eventually reach interstellar space. Hoping to share some details about our celestial neighborhood and the human experience, Sagan chose the material for the record should any spacefaring alien species intercept the…

  • Learn Like an Egyptian

    Science has given humanity many gifts over the centuries. Denying that fundamental truth is like cutting out a piece of our souls and banishing it to oblivion to suffer a tragic death, yet many continue to criticize it. I like to say that science isn’t what you know—it’s what you don’t. To put a finer…

  • Myopia of Faith

    What I am about to write today has been marinating for many months, but the impetus behind today’s post comes from a single word that stood out to me while listening to the LDS Church President’s General Conference talk, “Let God Prevail.” President Russel M. Nelson related a story about a single word of advice…

  • It Doesn’t Matter if You’re Zeroes or Ones

    Former football coach Chris Petersen, who coached for Boise State University and later, the University of Washington, became well known for analytical thinking when it came to studying footage of his and opposing players. It’s never as good as you think, Petersen claimed, nor is it ever as bad as you think. Petersen used this…

  • The Winter of Relativity

    In the early 20th Century, a physicist named Albert Einstein posited that space-time becomes warped around massive celestial objects. By building from Newtonian laws, Einstein crafted his famous theory of relativity and suggested that an object’s energy is directly proportional to its mass. Thus the equation E=MC² was born. Many scientists over the decades challenged…

  • A is for Atonement

    As America continues to grapple with the subject of police reform and racism, it has become increasingly clear that we need change if we are to move past these issues. According to recent polling, the vast majority of Americans would agree with that statement. Do you remember the Disney movie Zootopia, which proclaimed that anyone…

  • Humility and Prejudice

    This past October, I had the opportunity to take a weeklong vacation with my family to Northern California. We saw all the sights of San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Muir Woods National Monument. When returning back to our hotel in Sacramento from the Bay Area one evening, we stopped to eat at a fast food…

  • Reflections on Truth

      If you have a tile or hardwood floor in your home, I have an experiment for you to try. If you are familiar with the visual trick where you close one eye to view something and then close the other eye and the thing you’re viewing appears to move, you will have the basis…

  • Dr. Jehovah in the House

      Whenever science and religion clash, we expect the internet to explode into bouts of fiery anger and vitriolic name-calling. While these reactions are not unexpected, they are counterproductive in that they press the debate until it is not a debate at all. Ire and finger-pointing accomplish nothing but collectively raising our blood pressure. I…