I took my family to see Palmyra recently. My wife had been there before, but none of the rest of us had. One thing I’ve learned about Mrs. C is that she doesn’t really have the fourth-dimensional sense of wonder at occupying a historically significant spot of earth. I can personally attest that she’s much more excited to enjoy a Caesar salad than she was to visit Caesar’s tomb. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t find history interesting, just that she doesn’t take any special pleasure in retracing its steps.

“It’s a gift, you know, being able to feel history in certain places. My mom has it. We’d visit Church historical sites, and she would ask me, ‘Can you feel that?’ But I never really did.” (more…)

A friend of mine … asked his son what he wanted to be, whom he would want to be like. His son named a member of the ward who lived nearby, a man he had admired for some time. Don drove his son to where the man lived.

As they sat in their automobile in front of his home, they observed the man’s possessions and his way of life. They also discussed his kindness and generosity, his good name and integrity. They discussed the price their neighbor had paid to become what he was: the years of hard work, the schooling and training required, the sacrifices made, the challenges encountered. The affluence and seeming ease with which he now lived had come about as the result of diligent toil toward his righteous goals and the blessings of the Lord.

The son selected other men whom he deemed models of successful and righteous living and learned from a wise father the stories of their lives.

-thus Rex d. Pinegar.  What an excellent model.  Young men in the church should be spending their time with older men.  The primary good of a camp out is usually the conversations over the campfire or while hiking.  It is really surprising how little the young know about the lives of their elders and how much they like to hear those stories when given a chance.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

What a nice sentiment, you are thinking. Wrong, child. It should be keeping you awake at night. Properly understood, it is cosmic horror. (more…)

This is a talk I gave at Church.  I had a blast.

The Book of Mormon is for our times.  We all know about the Great and Spacious Building that Lehi saw.  It was towering up in the air and full of people with fancy clothes pointing and laughing and it had no foundation.  It made lots of people lose their way because they were ashamed or wanted to get to it.

The Book of Mormon is for our times.  It means that in our times we have to worry about bullying and mocking from prominent people, about trying to be high status, and fashions.  So let’s talk about that. (more…)

13 years ago my little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on her birthday that year, with slight updates since. Today would be Betsey’s 17th birthday.

My wife baked her a cake.  I bought a few balloons and ordered flowers for her grave.

Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.

Today our grief for you is fresh.

Comments closed to keep the comments all in one place.

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…)

I recently came to the surprising realization that there are important commonalities between the religious principles of Jordan Peterson and those of the Mormon Transhumanists. Surprising to me, at least, because I really like Jordan Peterson and find Mormon Transhumanism repellent. (more…)

My mother tells me that when I was a little fella, I would spend the late afternoon standing on the couch looking out the window for my father to come home.  When he did, I would quickly sit down and act like I was absorbed in a picture book.  But he was never fooled.  In he’d come and we’d wrestle.

Kids waiting for you to come home is one of the pleasures in life.  They are so eager.  Its mostly the younger ones, though the older ones sometimes rush over with news they’ve been busting to tell you. (more…)

One of the missionaries in our ward said she really likes a Mormon group called the Nashville Tribute Band. Her favorite song was one called “Apostles“:

I could criticize the song, but it does have the strange power of cheap music.  And the song has a heck of a situation: a last meeting of the New Testament Apostles before they go out across the world never to see each other again. (more…)

God appears to Moses, and then when He leaves, the devil.

The devil appeared to Joseph Smith, and then God.

Feast, then famine.  Famine, then feast.

Our world is at war. Every year the forces of dark grind away. Every year the Lord of the Armies of Light, Santa Claus by name, sallies forth and reverses much or all of their inroads.

The deadliest weapon in the arsenal of Light is their mirth. Their laughter slays. They are fiercely, immensely jolly.

The Castles of Christmas are their unbreachable redoubt. They return there every year to regroup and rest where they cannot be touched.

It is said that the castles have one weakness. If ever the merry laughter ceases, the walls will be breached.

But it hasn’t happened yet. Because Santa Claus and the other men of Christmas have a secret.

They know that at the heart of the Castles, there is a land where a Child is in a manger under a starry sky. And that land can never be breached. There is no weakness, no trick, no eventuality, that can take that refuge away.

When the reverses are piling up and the War of Christmas is going grim, Santa and his men begin to think about the great surprise that the dark will have when they breach the Castles, and the hilarious anticipation of that surprise makes them break out in great ringing laughter.

I have been thinking a lot about the Church’s recent announcement about expanding the youth’s responsibilities in the temples.

[Editor’s note: Priests in the Aaronic Priesthood will now perform baptisms for the dead and act as witnesses for the baptisms.  Young women who have limited-use (non-endowed) temple recommends can perform the matronly roles in assisting with temple baptisms.]

Of course, my first thought was about my three teenagers. They have been very involved in temple and family history work since our temple was dedicated this year. But with this change, all of the sudden my 17-year-old son seemed more priestly. And the two others seemed to straighten up a little when they heard it. I read this gem in Ether yesterday, and I am sure it is connected somehow: “We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of men.” I think our youngsters are finding great power in small-looking things.

-from FoJG JRL-in-AZ

Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? or naked, and clothed thee?

Joseph and Mary would not have asked this question.  They knew when they had done this for Jesus.  They did it in Bethlehem.

Jesus’ helplessness as a little baby made their care for him meaningful.

And because what is done to any is as if done to Christ–“inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren,” he says, and he experiences all of our woes and, I believe, our joys alongside us–our care for our own little children is meaningful to Him also.

People who act need things and people to be acted upon in order for their actions to be meaningful.  These can be the helpless, like infants.  At the other end of the scale, the fully adult and fully divine risen Jesus, full of power, is also someone to be acted upon.  All our actions act upon him, therefore all our acts our meaningful.

It is interesting that our lives seem to go full circle.  The most helpless and the most powerful both occupy something of a similar role in our lives.

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom.”

“Jesus, Lord at his birth.”