http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_18141649
Essays, posts, and videos for Christmas time.
A Missionary Reminisce on Christmas — Ben Spackman
When the mission president announced to our small group of greenies that I was going to Strasbourg, I shrugged the resigned shrug of a missionary who knew nothing about anywhere but was willing to go wherever. One of the sisters expressed jealousy; Strasbourg, she said, was one of the best cities in the mission.
She was right, and it would not be a good thing.
Steve Sailer asks “What will Mormons do post Romney?” (more…)
We watched “Empire of the Sun” over the weekend, which I last saw in a movie theater 25 years ago. (more…)
NASA will crash two craft orbiting the moon into a mountain and examine the dust that flies up.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/news/grail20121213.html
According to the Sacramento Bee, “Nevada health officials no longer will send psychiatric patients alone on buses to cities across the county.”
“The Bee’s investigation found that Rawson-Neal purchased Greyhound tickets for more than 1,500 patients since July 2008, dispatching people to every state in the continental United States”
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