“Because young men and young women ages 12 through 18 are a vital part of hastening the work of salvation, please invite and encourage them to attend the Saturday evening sessions of the stake conferences in 2014.” Thus the First Presidency was quoted regarding the schedule for our upcoming stake conference in March.
A couple months ago when an employee of the Church’s Research Information Division asked me and others of my ward what the Church could do to help families prepare youth for mission, I said a more coherent message was desirable. Is the great value of 18-year-old missionaries that they are simple (19-year-olds not being simple enough), or is it that they are prepared despite their youth? If this is the answer, I like it.
I now have to come up with a babysitter, though. Maybe the neighbor gentile girl will be available. Thinking about it, maybe I will stay home with the younger Mansfields. My thoughts are conflicting. The adult evening session has always been the more insiderish part of stake conference, for people willing to go to church on a Saturday night. I want the youth to be part of that, but can it remain that with a bunch of teenagers dragged along by parents? In particular, I fear an overdose of focus on the youth of the noble birthright during the inauguration of this change that I wouldn’t mind missing.
This article names some of the rubes trying to do so. Unsurprisingly, many are from what passes for our artistic elite.
An apparatchik may be defined as a person who doesn’t mind how long a meeting goes on unless he has another meeting to attend.
Christian gentleman and friend of the blog Arakawa is mulling humor in heaven.
(more…)
Full quote, from an outsider who looks favorably upon the LDS church:
“Anything can be perverted by Leftism, as Roman Catholics are beginning to wake up to. RCs thought they had everything made clear and consistent in their Catechism and structure of authority, but it has now become very thoroughly corrupted nonethless.
Mormonism, by contrast, has many ‘liberal’ elements (in my opinion Mormonism has most of the genuinely good things about leftism – because of course there are good things about leftism, notwithstanding that it is overall the greatest evil in the history of the world) and yet Mormonism NOW is at its best and on average probably more ‘devout’ than it ever has been (at least since the days of Brigham Young’s theocracy).
But it certainly is under attack. Most of (not all!) the Mormon bloggers, for example, are liberal subversives who have learned absolutely *nothing* from what liberalism has done to the mainstream denominations (ie. shrunk, weakened, inverted and destroyed them).”
– because family is the primary metaphor for divine love.
To misunderstand the family leads modern Man to misunderstand God – to find Him incomprehensible.
Thus, Bruce Charlton.
This dovetails with his previous post about how without God you cannot love your neighbour.
From the blog of a JrG commenter:
“First Love God – because without God you cannot Love your neighbour.
Without Love of God, then love of neighbour becomes just ‘altruism’ – policies, laws, regulations; taxes; doles, welfare, subsidies, allowances, benefits… statecraft and suppression of those who oppose it.
Which is anti-Love.
We see this all around us. The experiment has been done – look at the results.
Under Obamacare, disease is the silent killer.
— Thus James Taranto
And how Joseph Smith resolved the need for un-understandable ambiguiity by throwing out the philosophical metaphysics at the core of classical Christianity. An analysis by Bruce Charlton.