Over the past week or two, the emphasis for the Come, Follow Me curriculum in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been on the recovery of the Book of Mormon and on the witnesses to that recovery. In that context, some of you might find this short video feature of interest and of use: “Episode 32: To Be a Witness”
By the way: Undaunted is available for free streaming at The Witnesses Initiative. And so, for the moment, is the theatrical movie Witnesses itself — somewhat to my surprise. I don’t know exactly when the free-streaming opportunity for Witnesses will close. Possibly today. It won’t be long, in any case.
In temple news out of Texas, “Fairview mayor pleads with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to avoid lawsuit: The mayor said he’d go to Utah if it means he can meet with a church leader about the height of the proposed McKinney Texas Temple.”
I have a modest proposal, though, that might satisfy officials in Fairview: The Church should redesign its planned temple to make it blend in with the neighborhood. So that you’re able to form a picture in your mind, photographs of the quaint rural hamlet over which the currently proposed temple would tower can be found here. However, the Lost Creek Village strip mall, which sits directly across the street from the temple site, offers an appropriate architectural model for a revised and more modest design, one that local people seem already to have accepted. And, specifically, the image of the all-seeing eye that appears above the sign for Fairview Eyecare needs to be incorporated into the exterior appearance of the new temple.
In a possibly related story, “Texas lawmaker calls for investigation into planned Muslim-centric development in D-FW: A state representative from Allen wants the AG’s office to investigate the planned development.” Allen, Texas, by the way, is a suburban city in Collin County, in the northern suburbs of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. So is Fairview, to which It is directly adjacent. In fact, Allen’s northeastern border is formed by Stacy Road, the road on which Fairview Eyecare and the Lost Creek Village strip mall and the Thai Papaya restaurant and a CVS pharmacy sit — directly across the street from the site (just east of an existing Latter-day Saint meetinghouse at 651 East Stacy Road) of the proposed McKinney Texas Temple.
When, at the United Nations a few days ago, my government stood heroically with the governments of Belarus, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, and Syria against the violent, oppressive, and imperialist “country” of Ukraine, I thought that I could not possibly be any prouder than I was at that moment to be a citizen of the United States. (For related documentary footage, see here.) Even China could not summon up the moral courage to vote against Ukraine, although Chinese officials went out of their way afterward to heap praises upon Russia. But I was wrong. In the Oval Office of the White House on Friday morning, our leaders bravely gave Ukraine’s tyrannical dictator a well deserved public verbal thrashing, and I’m inspired beyond any possible words. Indeed, I can only exclaim сделать Америку великой снова!
Here’s a passage from Jonah Goldberg — who, like the execrable Volodymyr Zelensky himself, may well be a Jewish Nazi — that he posted yesterday after the masterful diplomatic display at the White House:
In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy Jr. said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” That might have been overly grandiose, but it was directionally right for the leader of the free world to draw those lines. Trump’s—and most emphatically Vance’s—position is “We might help you out, we might not. It all depends on our cut.”
Finally, I share with you a trio of my recent discoveries from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:
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