Here’s a bunch of them at Millennial Star going on about their wish that the LDS Church would drop scouting.
“By a conservative estimate, current concentrations [of greenhouse gases] are trapping an extra amount of energy equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding across the face of the earth every day,” according to Justin Gillis writing for the New York Times
This is a rather inapt comparison because a nuclear bomb releases energy over an astonishingly short time time scale, in a concentrated area, and leaves its surroundings drastically altered. It’s effects are not incremental, not continuously distributed through the day, nor distributed across the entire face of the planet.
“Your words have been stout against me, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, What have we spoken so much against thee? Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts? And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.”—Malachi 3:13-15
The Celestial Room of the St. George Temple is a relatively colorful room. Morning light diffuses from three sides, including through the open doors of two small sealing rooms off the south side of the Celestial Room. (more…)
Christ alone could atone for mankind. Christ alone suffered our sins in Gethsemane.
Which makes you wonder why an angel stopped by to lend him a hand. Luke 22:43.
In restoration doctrine, this angel was Michael, i.e, Adam.
We know that an angel came from the courts of glory to strengthen him in his ordeal, and we suppose it was mighty Michael, who foremost fell that mortal man might be.
What does it mean that Adam strengthened Christ during the Atonement?
Most of the year, then, I spent in ways Thoreau would have recognized: sometimes on the shores of Walden Pond, sometimes atop Ktaadn, alternately healing and agonizing. Summers, however, I approached nature in decidedly unnatural ways, worrying less about understanding nature than helping shape it into something abstract and alien. I worked each summer through most of the 1970s as a surveyor for the Utah office of the Cadastral Survey, a sub-bureau of the Bureau of Land Management, and pretty much did what my supervisors told me to do—in spite of the qualms I’d carefully nurtured in my more gentle experiences in nature—and painstakingly documented in the University of Utah library. I spent eight long summers helping Thomas Jefferson achieve his dream of an American landscape entirely and eternally subdivided into perfect square-mile sections, personally doing those observations, measurements and calculations that pay homage to our founding fathers’ vision of a classically ordered and economically useful American landscape, committing crimes against the southern Utah landscape I’ve spent many years repenting for. I can’t plead ignorance: even then, I understood that my work on a government survey crew was imperialistic, phallocentric, and linear beyond any right-brain redemption. My reading in French philosophy helped me understand that land surveying was existentially inauthentic, and my reading in Marxist theory made it impossible for me to deny that the rectangular survey did anything other than promote the agenda of the ruling class.
As a result of this basic conflict in my life, I was required to spend each fall, winter, and spring defending what I’d been doing each summer. At one point, a group of my friends arranged a kind of intervention, forcing me to face the essential hypocrisy of my life and demanding that I come to terms with my environmental incorrectness, an all-night confrontation that culminated with a woman shouting at me: “How dare you draw lines on nature!” Exhausted, I told her it was only a job, money for tuition and rent and auto repair, but even as I said the words, I knew I wasn’t telling her the truth. The truth was that I loved my work, loved it in ways that involved need and dependence and even, as happens in the deepest loves, the possibility for both physical and spiritual transcendence.
http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2013.1/13.1Hales.htm
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865651730/Meet-the-Churchs-new-General-Authorities.html?pg=all
http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/fortescues-meurs-scores-biggest-pay-package-20121010-27cut.html
I heard an interesting testimony last Sunday. (more…)
I found this article interesting in relation to many themes that come up at our website: Rising From The Ashes: Restoration Begins At LDS Ranch At Warm Springs
For example,
“In the past, life was a little different,” [Area Director of LDS Facilities Mark] Waite said as he noted evidence of old Eagle Scout projects of the past embedded in the infrastructure of the property. “You could come out and just put something in with whatever supplies had been donated for that purpose. We used to have every different PVC pipe that you can imagine running out here. People would just come out on a Saturday and run a water line as a project. We don’t do those kinds of things anymore.”
Nowadays the key improvements to the area will be done uniformly and up to the appropriate code using a qualified contractor, Waite said. Of course, that requires more time and it costs more money than using volunteer labor. So the entire area will not be able to be restored at once with the initial insurance settlement funding.
The facilities will be better constructed, but that reflects a narrow vision of their purpose.
My stake president died yesterday. (more…)
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190910-the-major-cities-being-designed-for-adults-not-families
The pioneers lived like heroes. We should buy the mythic narrative about them. Yet their greatness was not that they were always great. (more…)