On Sunday night, at the recommendation of friends, my wife and I watched a film titled The Way. Telling the story of several people who are walking the famous pilgrimage route Camino de Santiago, it was directed by Emilio Estevez, who appears in it himself at several points, and it stars his father, Martin Sheen. With that recent viewing of the movie on my mind, my attention was caught by this article, which was not — but easily could have been — written in response to The Way: “Can you take religion out of the Camino? Many seek a “spiritual” journey on Spain’s famous trail, but the trek to Santiago is rooted in centuries of Christian faith”
With our core filmmakers and Camrey Bagley Fox and Jenessa Sheffield, I spent most of the daylight hours today up in Salt Lake City, next to the Utah State Capitol, filming at the Pioneer Memorial Museum (the headquarters of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers) for our forthcoming Becoming Brigham documentary project. I didn’t get home until mid-evening. These short documentaries will represent the next phase of what we’re calling, overall, The Witnesses Initiative. We now have about thirty of these mini-documentaries recorded.
By the way, the Museum is an astonishing treasure trove of artifacts and documents from Utah’s pioneer era. If you’re at all into Utah and/or Latter-day Saint history, it’s definitely worthy of a visit.
In other news from the largely comatose Interpreter Foundation, these items went up today on the Foundation’s never-changing website:
- Nibley Lectures: Come, Follow Me Doctrine and Covenants 94–97 “For the Salvation of Zion”. During 1978, 1979, and 1980, Hugh Nibley taught a Doctrine and Covenants Sunday School class. Cassette recordings were made of these classes and some have survived and were digitized by Steve Whitlock and recently enhanced by Nick Galieti. Most of the tapes were in pretty bad condition. The original recordings usually don’t stop or start at the beginning of the class and there is some background noise. Volumes vary, probably depending upon where the recorder was placed in the room. Many are very low volume but in most cases it’s possible to understand the words. In a couple of cases the ends of one class were put on some space left over from a different class. There’s some mixup around D&C 90-100 that couldn’t be figured out so those recordings are as they were on the tapes. Even with these flaws and missing classes, we believe these these will be interesting to listen to and valuable to your Come, Follow Me study program.
- Interpreter Foundation Come, Follow Me Podcast September 1 – 7: “For the Salvation of Zion” Doctrine & Covenants 94–97. For the 14 August 2025 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Terry Hutchinson, Kevin Christensen, and Mark Johnson discussed the Come, Follow Me Doctrine & Covenants lesson for September 1 – 7 covering D&C 94–97. The Discussion segment of the 11 August 2025 podcast can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-podcast-august-14-2025.
- Come, Follow Me — D&C Study and Teaching Helps (2025): Doctrine and Covenants 94–97 September 1 – 7: “For the Salvation of Zion.” Jonn Claybaugh shares another of his concise sets of notes for students and teachers of the Church’s “Come, Follow Me” curriculum.
Good legal news has just come in: “10th Circuit Court rules for Latter-day Saints in tithing, fraud case: Three-judge panel finds that the First Amendment protects The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from claims made by former member”
It’s not surprising that, in our pathologically litigious society, some critics of the Church and some alienated former Latter-day Saints would turn to the courts in order to pursue their battle against the Restoration, seeking to enlist the coercive power of the state as a weapon. I’m saddened by such legal bids, of course, but I take satisfaction every time they fail. And I suppose that, like anti-Mormon blogs and message boards, they’re preferable to traditional mobs, expulsions, and lynchings.
My wife and I took our friend Louis Midgley out to dinner last night, Monday night. Now well into his ninety-fifth year, Lou is one of our very favorite people. He’s still quite active mentally, still reading and writing, and we had an excellent time. Good food and good conversation — as I’ve said before and will almost certainly say again, they are, when they’re conjoined, a really good part of the good life.
Lou Midgley served a mission in his youth among the Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand and, after he had retired from Brigham Young University, he and his wife served a mission for the Church Education System, directing the Lorne Street Institute of Religion in Auckland and ministering to men in prison. (I visited Elder and Sister Midgley while they were there, giving firesides and lectures during my stay.)
Such service is one of the best things that an older couple can do, one of the best ways in which they can spend their senior years. So a story like this hits with special sadness: “Senior Missionary Passes Away in Accident: Elder Brent Blackburn was serving at the Adam-ondi-Ahman site in Missouri”
I once spoke with a senior missionary who was riding one of those big lawnmowers there at Adam-ondi-Ahman. He was a retired farmer (from Idaho, I think), and he told me that he was absolutely serving his dream mission, lovingly tending to a site that he held sacred. I would be quite surprised if Elder Blackburn didn’t feel much the same way. In a predictable place, though, critics of the Church are wielding Elder Blackburn’s death as a weapon against the Church. He was, they say, an elderly man who was being kept away from his grandchildren and exploited as a source of unpaid labor by Church leaders, who are paid. He was volunteering as an uncompensated gardener for a wealthy “church” corporation that should have been paying professional groundskeepers to do his job.
Such complaints remind me of my mission president: By the time that Edwin Q. Cannon died, he had served as a young missionary to Germany, a bishop, president of the Switzerland Zürich Mission, a counselor in the International Mission presidency, a special envoy to Ghana and Nigeria after the priesthood revelation of 1978, a full-time missionary to West Africa, director of the visitors center in Nauvoo, interim president of the Germany Hamburg Mission, and president of the Frankfurt Germany Temple. And, of course, His wife, Janath, served at his side in almost all of those callings, including missionary service in West Africa and service as temple matron in Germany, in addition to her own independent calling as first counselor in the general presidency of the Relief Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I once wrote something somewhere, maybe on this blog, about what wonderful lives Ted and Janath Cannon had led. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, a handful of The Usual Suspects felt the need to respond, attacking the Church for the way it had abused and exploited them in their senior years. I remember thinking, by contrast, about how wonderful it was that their last years were filled with meaning and purpose, and that they are remembered with affection by people all around the world whose lives they had touched — in the United States, in Germany, in Switzerland, in Ghana, in Nigeria. I am one of those people.
“The cynic,” Oscar Wilde once observed, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Finally, as I often do, I close with something that I’ve retrieved from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. Today’s abomination is “Does Religion Matter? How Faith and Religion Create Healthy Societies.”
But this, too, was found near the Hitchens File: “U.S. Military and Church Leaders Connect During Bishops’ Central Storehouse Visit: Recruiters and Military Relations division learn from each other in visit”
And there’s this, also. Plainly theistic overreach pays no attention to national borders. It absolutely doesn’t respect them: “Learn Why Canada’s Oshawa Is a Global JustServe City: The millionth volunteer of the global community movement, JustServe is from the same area”
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