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<\/a>On Sunday night, at the recommendation of friends, my wife and I watched a film titled The Way<\/em>. \u00a0Telling the story of several people who are walking the famous pilgrimage route\u00a0Camino de Santiago<\/em>, it was directed by Emilio Estevez, who appears in it himself at several points, and it stars his father, Martin Sheen. \u00a0With that recent viewing of the movie on my mind, my attention was caught by this article, which was not \u2014 but easily could have been \u2014 written in response to The Way<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cCan you take religion out of the Camino? Many seek a \u201cspiritual\u201d journey on Spain\u2019s famous trail, but the trek to Santiago is rooted in centuries of Christian faith\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n With our core filmmakers<\/a> and Camrey Bagley Fox<\/a> and Jenessa Sheffield<\/a>, 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<\/em> documentary project. \u00a0I didn\u2019t get home until mid-evening. \u00a0These short documentaries will represent the next phase of what we\u2019re calling, overall, The Witnesses Initiative<\/a>. \u00a0We now have about thirty of these mini-documentaries recorded.<\/p>\n By the way, the Museum is an astonishing treasure trove of artifacts and documents from Utah\u2019s pioneer era. \u00a0If you\u2019re at all into Utah and\/or Latter-day Saint history, it\u2019s definitely worthy of a visit.<\/p>\n In other news from the largely comatose Interpreter Foundation, these items went up today on the Foundation\u2019s never-changing website:<\/p>\n Good legal news has just come in: \u00a0\u201c10th Circuit Court rules for Latter-day Saints in tithing, fraud case:\u00a0Three-judge panel finds that the First Amendment protects The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> from claims made by former member\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s 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. \u00a0I\u2019m saddened by such legal bids, of course, but I take satisfaction \u00a0every time they fail. \u00a0And I suppose that, like anti-Mormon blogs and message boards, they\u2019re preferable to traditional mobs, expulsions, and lynchings.<\/p>\n My wife and I took our friend Louis Midgley<\/a> out to dinner last night, Monday night. \u00a0Now well into his ninety-fifth year, Lou is one of our very favorite people. \u00a0He\u2019s still quite active mentally, still reading and writing, and we had an excellent time. \u00a0Good food and good conversation \u2014 as I\u2019ve said before and will almost certainly say again, they are, when they\u2019re conjoined, a really good part of the good life.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0(I visited Elder and Sister Midgley while they were there, giving firesides and lectures during my stay.)<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0So a story like this hits with special sadness: \u00a0\u201cSenior Missionary Passes Away in Accident:\u00a0Elder Brent Blackburn was serving at the Adam-ondi-Ahman site in Missouri\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n I once spoke with a senior missionary who was riding one of those big lawnmowers there at Adam-ondi-Ahman. \u00a0He 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. \u00a0I would be quite surprised if Elder Blackburn didn\u2019t feel much the same way. \u00a0In a predictable place, though, critics of the Church are wielding Elder Blackburn\u2019s death as a weapon against the Church. \u00a0He 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. \u00a0He was volunteering as an uncompensated gardener for a wealthy \u201cchurch\u201d corporation that should have been paying professional groundskeepers to do his job.<\/p>\n Such complaints remind me of my mission president:\u00a0By the time that Edwin Q. Cannon died, he had served as a young missionary to Germany, a bishop, president of the Switzerland Z\u00fcrich 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. \u00a0And, 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.<\/p>\n I once wrote something somewhere, maybe on this blog, about what wonderful lives Ted and Janath Cannon had led. \u00a0And, 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. \u00a0I 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 \u2014 in the United States, in Germany, in Switzerland, in Ghana, in Nigeria. \u00a0I am one of those people.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cynic,\u201d Oscar Wilde once observed, \u201cknows the price of everything and the value of nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, as I often do, I close with something that I\u2019ve retrieved from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u2122. \u00a0Today\u2019s abomination is \u201cDoes Religion Matter? How Faith and Religion Create Healthy Societies.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n But this, too, was found near the Hitchens File<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cU.S. Military and Church Leaders Connect During Bishops\u2019 Central Storehouse Visit:\u00a0Recruiters and Military Relations division learn from each other in visit\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\n
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