"Stone Cold Sober"

The first temple in the United Kingdom — The London England Temple (LDS.org)

“If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” (Michael Crichton)

“To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.” (reputed Chinese proverb)

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“Site Announced for Moses Lake Washington Temple: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced the location of the Moses Lake Washington Temple.”

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I really, really liked this brief video of President M. Russell Ballard and Elder D. Todd Christofferson and Sister Christofferson together back at the Joseph Smith Birthplace in Vermont. It’s not quite three minutes long, and I hope that you’ll take the time to watch it:

“Birthplace of a Prophet: President Ballard, Elder Christofferson testify”

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A Muslim woman notices the casually assumed anti-Mormonism that afflicts certain “progressive” types in Salt Lake City:

“Luna Banuri: Rocky Anderson’s attack on Mormonism feels all too familiar to Muslims”

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A new entry on the Neville-Neville Land blog (“Refuting the errors of Jonathan Neville and the Heartland hoax”), which relentlessly chronicles the bizarre accusations and weird contentions of Mr. Jonathan Neville, a vocal (and increasingly insulting) proponent of the so-called “Heartland model” of Book of Mormon geography:

“Apparently, people who disagree with Jonathan Neville are followers of Satan”

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Looking southward across BYU — A south-looking view of part of the campus of Brigham Young University, from the BYU website

Responding to the latest ranking — we’re number one for the twenty-second year in a row! — from The Princeton Review: “Celebrating 22 Years Stone Cold Sober: BYU’s new Milk & Cookies bar will serve new milk flavors including raspberry, pumpkin spice, French vanilla and root beer”

Many years ago, when I first joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, I found myself speaking one day with a visiting professor, not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who was teaching in another department. I asked him what struck him most about his teaching experience at BYU, and his answer surprised me just a little bit: He was astonished that his students were cheery and awake on Monday mornings. Back at his home campus, Monday morning classes were essentially a waste of time, he said, because his students were typically hung over from the weekend’s revels. (Incidentally, the thing that struck him most about Utah more generally was how many people spoke unexpected languages and had lived in exotic locales. He quite often encountered clerks and rural service station attendants who just happened to speak Thai or Portuguese or Finnish, to have spent two years living in Seoul or Tokyo or Stockholm, and so forth.)

“Stone Cold Sober”