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An interesting new — very new — item was posted today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
“The First Days and the Last Days: Commentary on Joseph Smith—Matthew”
Please take a look!
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Just in time for Christmas and the beginning of the 2022 Old Testament Come Follow Me curriculum, two new books by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw:
The First Days and the Last Days: A Verse-By-Verse Commentary on the Book of Moses and JS—Matthew in Light of the Temple
Enoch and the Gathering of Zion: The Witness of Ancient Texts for Modern Scripture
These two books, in digital or softcover format, are available at a substantial discount when purchased together.
Also, the latest volume of the Temple on Mount Zion series, The Temple: Past, Present, and Future, is now available for purchase.
See https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ for details of all three books.
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Christmas is, indeed, drawing very near. Some of you may have already finished your Christmas shopping. But I’m betting that at least one or two of you haven’t. (See above.)
In any event, it’s probably well past time for me to remind you of something important:
More and more, for good or for ill, people do their shopping online. Especially in this time of pandemic. And one of the principal places where they do that shopping is Amazon.com. (Until his rather expensive recent divorce, this fact made Jeff Bezos the richest man in modern history.)
Did you know that you can enlist Amazon to donate to an eligible charitable cause of your choice?
By purchasing your books or whatever else through AmazonSmile rather than the regular Amazon.com — Amazon sells far, far more than merely books — you can have Amazon donate 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products to a charitable organization that you have chosen.
AmazonSmile, which is operated by Amazon itself, carries the same products and offers the same prices and shopping features as Amazon.com. The only difference is that when you shop on AmazonSmile, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate half a percent of the price you pay to a designated charity.
Thus, if you’ve chosen to buy $100.00 of chartreuse-speckled, liver-and-onion-flavored Acme widgets on Amazon.com, you can go instead to AmazonSmile and buy precisely the same number of delectable widgets for precisely the same $100.00 and with precisely the same convenience. In this case, though, Amazon will donate $0.50 — that is, fifty cents — to the charity that you have designated. And it costs you nothing. It is painless.
(It should also be noted that this won’t count as a charitable donation on your part, because it will be Amazon that is giving the money, not you.)
Now, you might object, this is a trivial amount. So small! Why bother?
True, it’s small. But if enough people do it, it will add up rapidly.
If, for example, 10,ooo people each make $1000 worth of purchases through AmazonSmile in a particular year, which is surely not impossible, they will have caused Amazon to give fully $50,000 that year.
Now, I’m going to suggest — big surprise — that the Interpreter Foundation would be a remarkably good charity for you to designate as a recipient of Amazon’s generosity. We are, as a matter of fact, eligible and on their list. And here is a brief video that my friend Tom Pittman kindly created about three years ago, showing you how to choose the Interpreter Foundation for this purpose:
Now, of course, you may be the kind of person who doesn’t want to give to the Interpreter Foundation. Maybe you’re the kind of person who would rather give to the Society for the Promulgation of Spray-Paint Graffiti or to the Friends of the Anopheles Mosquito or to the Serial Killer Defense Fund. (Precisely the sort of folks, of course, who wouldn’t want to support the Interpreter Foundation!) Frankly, I rather doubt that those august organizations are on Amazon’s list of eligible charities. But the fact is that there is absolutely no reason not to choose some charity as a recipient of Amazon’s corporate giving. Absolutely no reason at all.
Choose somebody — whether the Interpreter Foundation or somebody else — as your designated AmazonSmile charity. You can still make further charitable contributions to that organization or to another one. (In fact, as I say, in recruiting AmazonSmile to give to charities of your choosing you yourself won’t be giving to charity. It will cost you absolutely nothing. You will be spending absolutely nothing. You’ll be giving absolutely nothing. Amazon will be the giver.)
There is, thus, no reason whatsoever to refuse Amazon’s generous offer. Whether it’s on behalf of the Interpreter Foundation or some other worthy organization.
Do it soon, though, before you really get into your desperate, last-minute Christmas shopping. Sign up with AmazonSmile. Don’t delay. Why not do it right now? Just do it.
And you can have Amazon give to the organization of your choice throughout the year, not merely at Christmas. Do this! There’s no downside.
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If you want to make an actual donation to the Interpreter Foundation, there are a variety of ways to do so. See here:
I would also like to call to your attention the little fundraiser that I’ve launched over on my personal Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/donate/431696278360223/10159496597431357
I realize full well that there are literally thousands of worthwhile organizations and causes that you might choose to support. I hope that you will do so. I also hope that at least a few of you will choose to give at least something to the Interpreter Foundation. It’s a good cause. There are worse.
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And don’t forget the Interpreter Foundation’s current online lecture series:
“A Life Lived in Crescendo”: Selected Punctuation Marks of Joseph Smith’s Final Years
A “Come, Follow Me” Virtual Fireside Series
Presented by The Interpreter Foundation, Book of Mormon Central, FAIR, & Meridian Magazine
Next Fireside: Sunday, December 19, at 6:00 PM MST
Joseph Smith’s Teachings and Practices Relating to Eternal Marriage and the Eternal Family,
with Barbara Morgan Gardner
To watch the upcoming Fireside and the final videos of previous Firesides, go to
https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/a-life-lived-in-crescendo-firesides/live-stream/
For more information including schedule, abstracts, and presenters, go to
https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/a-life-lived-in-crescendo-firesides/
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