I’m headed up to Alberta, Canada, this weekend, for a fireside in Calgary and then a couple of talks in Lethbridge. So anybody who wants to flee the province before my arrival has until sometime on Friday to do so. Here’s the schedule as I currently have it:
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Here’s an entertaining and informative 11:20-minute video that I think you’ll enjoy:
“Has the Book of Mormon CHANGED?”
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A PowerPoint presentation from the astonishing Robert Boylan, delivered in Dublin, Ireland, on Saturday, 13 October 2018:
“The Onomasticon of the Book of Abraham: Evidence for Authenticity.”
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Are you aware of this wonderful initiative? It is, if I understand it correctly, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but it’s absolutely open to everybody:
“JustServe Invites Disciples of Christ to Serve as He Would”
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This is a really good little video (a snappy 1:05 minutes long) to share across the internet. If you have the capacity to do that, please do it:
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Did you notice this? Nothing was made of it at the time:
“President Nelson’s Hymn Sung at the End of October 2018 General Conference”
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Incidentally, I notice that some of President Nelson’s requests — e.g., that we back off from social media for a little bit and reevaluate our use of such things, and that we reemphasize the official name of the Church — are receiving a fair amount of push-back in certain circles. And not merely among embittered enemies of the Church, who can be relied upon to dislike essentially everything that emerges from it, but even among some members. It reminds me of a line that was probably not original with President Harold B. Lee, but which I associate with him: Prophets, he said — or perhaps he said “the Gospel” — exist to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Or, to approach the matter from another direction: As I’ve said several times, if a prophet only ever said things that I had already thought of on my own and that always accorded with my views and attitudes, he would be pretty much redundant.
Obviously, we’re all struggling just a bit with President Nelson’s admonition to move away from the originally-derisive nickname Mormon and its derivatives. I participated in two small meetings this past Tuesday and Wednesday at Church headquarters that involved a total of four members of the Seventy and one member of the Twelve, and there were multiple references to “Mormons” and “Mormonism” in those meetings, along with smiles and gentle laughter and a good-natured recognition that it’s going to take us a while to revise old habits of speech. But President Nelson’s challenge makes sense to me, and I intend to align myself with it, to the extent that I can.
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