Mission

Pending the birth of Princess Kate’s baby, Lady Cosima Rose Alexandra Windsor is currently 24th in line for the British throne. Lady Cosima is the nearly three-year-old great granddaughter of a grandfather of the current queen. I didn’t know that, and I really wouldn’t care, but I did easily look it up, and I could do [...]

In January 2012, I did a blog post about topics women in the church were discussing.  I identified 10 practices that some women saw as unnecessarily discriminate or that were in other ways causing women to question their value in the church.  This was in response to a request Pres. Beck made of Mormon Mommy [...]

I’ve been very busy working with our full-time Mormon missionaries in our ward the past couple months and have been very impressed with all the work and effort they put in.  It has been a while since I have been this heavily involved in missionary service.  Some days can be very awesome and others can [...]

Brother Jake writes a guest post (AND makes a video!) on the assumed “simplicity” of the gospel. Is it really that simple though?

I must admit, before my trip to New Zealand over the holidays I had never heard of the Mormon Maori prophecies.  I knew that there are many Polynesian church members.  I was aware that the most popular religion in the island of Molokai (the spiritual center of Hawaii) is Mormonism, and that there are many [...]

“I stood amazed at the furor I had unwittingly caused.”  Amelia Bloomer When I first heard about the group All Enlisted organizing women to wear pants to church on Sunday, December 16, I was of two minds.  On the one hand, who cares?  Pants aren’t against the rules anyway, and I see lots of women wearing [...]

Is it better to preach the ideal or to make all feel welcome?  Is it even possible to do both?  Within the church, there seems to be a tug-of-war between encouraging people to live the ideal and trying to be welcoming to everyone.  A “come as you are” approach has merit if we want to [...]

Being a mormon comes at a cost. As Joseph Smith taught true religion requires sacrifice and implicit in the concept of sacrifice is a personal cost. Those who leave the church talk about the cost of leaving the church, in terms of losing friends, family and emotional upheaval. Others have pointed out to some of [...]

Peter Pan was a wonderful story for me as a six-year old when the Broadway show was first televised by NBC to help market the new-fangled color TVs. Even though we didn’t have the money for color TV, seeing pirates and flying children cavort above the stage even in black-and-white made the program then the [...]

Community of Christ is attempting to form a tradition — now that its World Conferences are held every three years instead of at six month intervals as is customary in LDS practice — of having its Prophet address the church in non-Conference years in something of a “state of the church” address. Community of Christ [...]

Missions are a breeding grounds of both speculation on deep doctrine and false doctrine. This is a sample of talks that fuel this speculation.

A criticism I’ve heard about Mormonism on the internet is:  “What’s unique about it isn’t good, and what’s good about it isn’t unique.”  While it’s true that Mormon culture has some flaws, and that other religions share some of its good points, I can’t agree with this observation.  Still, I think something about this phrase [...]

“Only two of the 18 launched lifeboats rescued people after the ship sank. Lifeboat 4 was close by and picked up five people, two of whom later died. Close to an hour later, lifeboat 14 went back and rescued four people, one of whom died afterward. Other people managed to climb onto the lifeboats that floated off [...]

We took a picture of the aftermath, Elder C2 and me toasting the camera with our goblets; his face, one of a man just snatched from the claws of hell.

Don’t worry, your greenie will soon sleep through the night and grow out of bursting into tears every hour whether she is hungry or not.

He let us in, sat us down, and asked a question that still haunts me: “Where *were* you guys?”

The Philip K. Dick inside me has hypothesized that in the not too distant future, insurance companies will require all missionaries to wear a GPS and a video camera 24/7.

We believed with every fiber of our being that to end one’s mission without having this experience would be to admit that you had not truly been a Toronto missionary.

Often, the most interesting aspect of a story is where it ends.

With fist-pumpin’, you-can-do-it, super zone leader zest, it laid out a gospel so simple, Nephi would have dropped his plates in awe.