I love the mantra, “No other success can compensate for failure in the home”, attributed to President David McKay. This counsel has been at the heart of many of the key decisions I have made so far in my life.
The following is taken verbatim from Greg Prince’s impressive biography David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. In the 1960s, LDS Church membership was just beginning to flourish outside the U.S., and this brought with it the challenge of catering to Latter-day Saints living in dispersed numbers across the globe. McKay was the first Church president to instigate the policy of discouraging new converts from immigrating to the United States, and providing the opportunity to visit a temple was key in this effort. At this time there were only 13 temples operating worldwide (5 of these dedicated during McKay’s term).
The following is pulled from a talk given by the President of the Oakland Stake in California in Fall 2010, as reported by Carol Lynn Pearson, a member of that stake, in a talk she gave in the recent Mormon Stories Conference entitled “No More Us Vs. Them”. Our purpose is to enlarge the tent of Zion by showing an increase in charity, both as individuals and as congregations.
I recently attended a conference in Salt Lake City about exploring Mormon identity. My main motive for attending is that I’m a big fan of anything Joanna Brooks or Carol Lynn Pearson have done, not to mention that some of my friends were the ones who put the conference together in the first place.
So I’m seeing potential 2012 presidential candidate Jon Huntsman take a lot of heat lately about his particular religious views. You might at first think I meant to say Mitt Romney, and that I meant 2008. Nope. In fact, that’s the ironic thing about it: many of the same people I see now assailing Huntsman for his religion were the same ones crying foul when Romney took heat in 2008 for his religion.
I don’t make a habit out of drawing parallels between my life and the life of a Disney princess, but I just finished watching Disney’s Tangled and found some intriguing similarities that might be useful for explaining my faith journey
This is adapted from a talk I recently prepared for my uncle’s church congregation. Coincidental to the theme the bishop picked for this month, I just happened to be reading Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, which includes a brief overview of the development of religious thought throughout history. It turns out that this would provide a nice setup for my talk.