Today I attended a local ecumenical Christian conference here in Wichita, KS. While there, Fr. Stephen Freeman, an Orthodox archpriest, gave a wonderful plenary address–ranging from deep phil…
Keira Shae is the author of the phenomenal BCC Press megahit How the Light Gets In, a memoir of her early life in the dark underbelly of Provo, Utah. She was taken from a Meth-house to an LDS foste…
I just spent the holidays with family. I’ve been married a year. I’m approaching my mid-30s. And due to an unrelenting year at work, I’ve gained some weight. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the last few…
Amos 3:7 reads, “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.” I know this because it was a Seminary scripture, a Missionary scripture, and perha…
The coats of skins Christ gave to Adam and Eve, and the promise of the protection they offer is a heavy-handed symbol of the atonement and the resurrection made available to us through Christ’s dea…
Today, church leaders announced [PDF] that women can now serve as official witnesses for baptisms (both in and out of the temple), and for sealings. In last few hours I have spoken to several frien…
If gender is eternal—and we are told by our prophets and revelators in no uncertain terms that it is—if women are to preside at the side of our brothers in the eternal act of creation, and if neith…
Living half a world away from ageing parents, I’d spent most of my adult life steeling myself for the day that they would precede me in death. Even so, it was a jolt when the message came on …
I’m just going to say it. Please don’t throw things. I loved President Packer’s talk.
Tonight with my two tiny children before bed, one clutching my hand, the other flying wordlessly into sleep, I sang them the same primary songs I have sung them every night for the past five years.…
Kenneth Merrill graduated from BYU with a degree in Philosophy and now works as a cinematographer in Los Angeles, CA. He’s married, with two boys, and in his spare time he likes to play music, rock…
Rachel Allred lives in California and loves her husband, her toddler, and ice cream (not necessarily in that order). She generally tries to make the world a more empathetic place. I literally star…
Mosiah 18 And after this manner he did baptize every one that went forth to the place of Mormon; and they were in number about two hundred and four souls; yea, and they were baptized in the waters …
The weather did not relent at any point. Yet when the deluge drenched me again and again, when the winds gusted, when I slowed to a crawl up heartbreak hill, when my phone and watch died and I had …
It seems like everyone is familiar with those diagrams with various circles that explain Mormon cosmology, and which outline the progression of the human soul through eternity (do an image search f…
We and the prophet have no language in common. To us the moral state of society, for all its stains and spots, seems fair and trim; to the prophet it is dreadful. So many deeds of charity are done,…
After the recent “Bottgate” hullabaloo and opposition to proxy baptisms of Shoah victims, we might have expected a bit of a break. But a new Slate column has again called our attention …
Earlier this year I wrote a piece about what I perceived as a lack of mourning with those who mourn in the church. It drew from some recent church issues that had troubled me deeply, and though I n…
Nearly four months after Parliament passed its Slavery Abolition Act in August, 1833 abolishing slavery in the British Empire, thanks primarily to the decades-long political campaign of the evangel…
The Come Follow Me manual’s resources for the week of Easter include no set reading from the New Testament. Instead, there is a broad range of scriptures referenced–mostly from Matthew,…
We believe that through the atonement of Christ all mankind may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel. We believe that these ordinances are 1st, Faith in the Lord Jesus Chr…
God calls us to first believe – and then to do the difficult, soul-searching work of converting that belief into action. It’s the entire point of the Book of James.
This talk was given in sacrament meeting in the Battlecreek 9th Ward in Pleasant Grove on the subject of Gratitude. My Mother died on July, 13th of this year. One late afternoon about a month later…
On the last Sunday in April, one of the counselors in the bishopric asked to meet with both Brother J and me. Whatever could this be about, we wondered—for about three seconds before my husband fig…
I do not know of a better combination of myth, art, and literature than W.H. Auden’s “Museè de Beaux Arts” (1938)—a poetic meditation on Pieter Breugel’s sixteenth century painting, Landscape with …
I have been thinking about Job a lot lately. No surprise, really. I think about Job a lot. It’s kind of my schtick. But I have been thinking specifically about Job’s Comforters–Zo…
And thou art after the order of him who was without beginning of days or end of years, from all eternity to all eternity. —Moses 6:67 Therefore, eternity was our covering and our rock and our salv…
Last week, Karen wrote a wrenching and important post about her observation that many women she has always known as faithful, devoted Latter-day Saints seem to be throwing in the towel on formal ac…
Audio recordings of talks from the symposium are available here, with video of Clayton Christensen’s plenary here. Symposium organizers Matt Bowman and Sharon Harris share their thoughts belo…
Nineteenth-Century England produced many greater poets than Francis Thompson and many, many better poems than “The Hound of Heaven.” But it probably didn’t produce a better metaph…
“I have no god”, Barabbas answered at last. . . “Why then do you bear this ‘Christos Iesus” carved on your disk?” “Because I want to believe,” Barabbas said This is not a book review, but it…
I have only seen one “no” vote in person, and it with feet not hands. I was a missionary in a small Spanish branch in Watsonville, California. The name of a new branch president was bei…
Cathy Gilmore is a friend of the blog and has posted with us previously. She is also currently working on a documentary history of her grandmother Dorothy Smith Clark. Cathy graduated from the Uni…
It is quite possible that Walt Whitman sent the best Christmas card ever in 1889, and he sent it to an entire country. That year, a Brazilian field marshal named Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca overthrew…
“Through our great books we may reenact [the] miracle of creation, which brings light and progress and understanding and pleasure into our minds and hearts.”–Sterling W. Sill, The Maje…
