[In today’s Washington Post]

Among those killed in the demonstrations was Moroni Lopez, a 22-year-old English student and former Mormon missionary. He had joined the protests after watching footage of police roughing up protesters. (more…)

The Governing Ones is one of the more unusual and interesting conference talks I’ve read.  Still chewing on it, to be honest.

Brother Bradford starts with the principle that priesthood is a government.  The rights of the priesthood are rights to govern. (more…)

A wolf found that a local lion frequently took the wolf’s kills.  The wolf would patiently stalk and hunt and kill, only to have the lion drive him off before he had eaten more than a bite or two.

The wolf brooded on this injustice but could think of no other remedy than to avoid the lion in his hunting.  But this often meant hunting in areas with less game, and still resulted with the lion driving the wolf off more than the wolf would like.

The wolf then hit on a clever plan.  Instead of avoiding the lion, he would hunt only where the lion was.  Over time, the lion would become dependent on the wolf’s hunting and would be unable to survive on his own.  The wolf would then flee and the lion would starve.

The wolf then set about his plan and was well on his way to success when he himself died of starvation.

Moral: Your plans always affect yourself.

Comment:  The wolf’s plan is clever in its way and could probably be the basis for a fable that illustrates the folly of becoming too dependent.  Yet this fable makes what seems to me to be a more important point.  Too many plans fail because they see the world as static.  Even very smart and experienced people make plans of this kind.  In the fable, one way the wolf’s plan could fail would be the lion figuring out the danger of dependency and hunting on his own occasionally just to keep his skills up.  The wolf would have no way of preventing it.  But an even graver error, and one that has a moral dimension, is that people forget that they themselves will be changed by their plans.

The Lovely One brought up the idea that Jacob getting the birthright from Isaac by deception was a type of us and Christ.  We inherit all that our father hath by assuming our older brother’s identity just like Isaac.  Of course what Jacob did was squirrelly and we were discussing whether even the unsavory could be types of Christ.  So I brought up Laban.  He is a type of Christ too, though wicked.

Bing!  The light bulb went on.

What if we’ve missed the complete meaning of the Armor of God scripture this whole time? (more…)

We are in the post-prandial stage of General Conference. (more…)

From a letter three weeks ago to a missionary son:

“More than most church responsibilities, everyone has an opinion what missionaries should be doing. ‘Every member a mission president.’ That’s not altogether without reason, as missionaries have a lot of authority. Though you will serve in the Melchizedek priesthood for the rest of your life, this is probably the only time who will bear the title ‘Elder.’ After that, the authority will be dormant, like the apostles in the quorum of the twelve who are all ordained and sustained as prophets, but only the church president exercises that ordination to the church and the world.”

In the Los Alamos Ward around 1992, a man whose face I remember, but not his name, was in our priesthood opening exercises for the first time, and when called upon, he introduced himself as a new move-in with his family. He was asked from the pulpit, “Elder or high priest?”, and hamming it up a bit, with self-pity he answered, “Neither, I’m a Seventy.” Brother Chamberlin, the ward’s last remaining refugee from the stake Seventies Quorum disbanded in ’86, turned and extended his arms in a gesture of embrace. “Welcome, brother.”

Another reminder of the past, from the 1986 instructions concerning discontinued stake Seventies quorums: “In the event that a stake seventies quorum operated a project or owned property, the stake presidency should, after prayerful consideration, submit its recommendation to the First Presidency concerning the disposition of such projects or properties.” A local quorum that operated a project or owned property? It was a different time, a different world.

How Rhodes Scholars think: “At the time of this interview, he [Gerrit Gong] was the assistant to the president of Brigham Young University in Utah, focusing on planning and assessment. He is now a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” (link)