
This announcement came out this evening from the Interpreter Foundation:
Just in time for your Come, Follow Me discussion of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon! Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon can now be viewed for free here: https://witnessesfilm.com/ Witnesses will go up for free from 2 Feb 2025 through 1 March 2025.
Just like the Three Witnesses, the Eight Witnesses, and the many other witnesses since, we invite you to be a witness of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of living prophets, of ongoing revelation, and especially of our Savior Jesus Christ. For the last several years we have dedicated our efforts to testifying of these things by proclaiming the Gospel and helping to perfect the saints through various media projects, including the theatrical movies Witnesses and Six Days in August. We invite you to join us in getting this essential message to as wide an audience as possible.

I was pleased, during a meeting today, to hear more about the upcoming RootsTech 2025. It seems likely that my wife and I will be out of Utah during the event this year, which will run 6-8 March, but we’re still hoping to participate in it online. There will be some very interesting sessions. I was also very happy to learn of a website and an organization of which I had never before heard: Black Lives Bless. You might find their website interesting.

You may already be aware of a project called Not by Bread Alone: Stories of the Saints in Africa (or, in French, Pas par le pain seulement : histoires des saints en Afrique) that is being created under the auspices of the Interpreter Foundation. Dr. Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, an Interpreter Foundation vice president who leads the effort, is seeking to raise $50K in order to complete the project in time for the dedication of the Lubumbashi Democratic Republic of the Congo Temple, which is expected to take place in late 2026.
NBBA, as we sometimes call it in communications among ourselves, is aimed not only at Western audiences but at African Latter-day Saints, including those who live in Francophone countries. We’re trying, among other things, to collect and preserve remarkable stories from the beginnings of the Church in Africa, stories from and about its pioneer members. (Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had video recordings of the early Saints in New York and Kirtland? If we possessed recorded interviews with people like Edward Partridge, Joseph Knight, Newell K. Whitney and Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Mary Musselman Whitmer and Peter Whitmer?) So we’re very pleased to note that some of the NBBA videos have now begun to attract even more French-speaking viewers than English-speaking viewers.
For all its volunteer laborers and its lack of a brick and mortar headquarters and a salaried staff, I realize that the Interpreter Foundation can still come across as something of a ravenously hungry beast, always in quest of money. Nobody regrets the need of continual fundraising more than I do — because I absolutely hate asking people for their money. But we can’t do our work without funds. Moreover, candidly, money that goes to Not by Bread Alone is money that won’t go to other ventures that Interpreter has undertaken. And that worries me. However, especially if you have a particular interest in Africa, would you please consider at least a small gift to Not by Bread Alone? Or, if you know of somebody who has such an interest, could you please bring NBBA to his or her attention? Or bring him or her to our attention? Such donations are tax-exempt under United States law because they are covered by the Interpreter Foundation’s overall 501(c)3 status as a tax-exempt organization. Instructions for contributing to the project, and for subscribing to news updates and film shorts as a friend of the project, are available at both NBBA’s English website and its French website.

Finally, I apologize for burdening the tender (although nonexistent) souls of my militantly secularist readers with yet more material from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, especially after yesterday’s relatively substantial download. However, I’ve discovered that, if I don’t make fairly frequent releases, the quantity of horrors builds up so high that the pressures can become dangerous when released. So, for safety’s sake, here’s another pair of items from the Hitchens File:
The first is a simple link: “Donation Will Help Women’s Shelter in Alberta.” How horrible and unforgivable!
The second is a quotation from an interview with Dr. Sam Young, an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana Wesleyan University who is currently a Miller Fellow at the Philadelphia-based Jack Miller Center (JMC). The interviewer is JMC Resident Historian Elliott Drago, whose interview with Professor Young focused on the professor’s work on religion, identity, Martin Luther, and Protestantism during the antebellum era. The following paragraph caught my attention as a clue to the nineteenth-century state of bliss from which Joseph Smith’s so-called “Word of Wisdom” banished the unfortunate Latter-day Saints who followed it:
I first came across W. J. Rorabaugh’s Alcoholic Republic as a graduate student, and it completely changed the way I thought about early American history. From 1790–1840, average alcohol consumption in America peaked at 7.1 gallons of distilled liquor per capita, over three times today’s consumption rate. When I share this fact with my students, it helps explain two important developments: first, the pervasiveness of violence in antebellum America. Alcohol fueled the mobs, riots, lynchings, vandalism, and duels that threatened the nation’s growing urban areas and the often lawless frontiers. Second, the appeal of the temperance movement. My students often scoff at the 18th Amendment and the failures of Prohibition, but temperance had broad popular appeal as a social cause precisely because alcohol was a pressing problem in the nineteenth century. Most Americans knew someone whose drinking had led to domestic violence, suicide, or poverty.