The LDS Church has a new official website, PreservingMarriage.org to support their efforts to preserve the traditional definition of marriage in California. Check it out. Also, LDS members everywhere can help support the effort by embedding church sponsored widgets and video from the site into their own blogs, websites, and facebook or myspace accounts. Check out the video below and embed it on your own website. You can get the embed code at the website.
This weekend is the semi-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every Conference I post links to MP3 audio and other Internet resources as they become available.
MP3 Audio
These are links to the earliest available audio I can find. I will post them as soon as the become available. They will be replaced by links to the official MP3s at the church website as they are posted.
Saturday Morning Session
Complete SessionPresident Thomas S. Monson
Elder L. Tom Perry
Silvia H. Allred
Elder Neil L. Andersen
Elder Marcos A. Aidukaitis
Elder Dallin H. Oaks
President Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Saturday Afternoon Session
Complete SessionPresident Henry B. Eyring
Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Elder Gérald Caussé
Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge
Elder D. Todd Christofferson
Elder David A. Bednar
Sunday Morning Session
Complete SessionPresident Henry B. Eyring
Elder Robert D. Hales
Bishop Keith B. McMullin
Elaine S. Dalton
Elder M. Russell Ballard
President Thomas S. Monson
Sunday Afternoon Session
Complete SessionPresident Boyd K. Packer
Elder Russell M. Nelson
William D. Oswald
Elder Eduardo Gavarret
Elder Carlos A. Godoy
Elder Quentin L. Cook
President Thomas S. Monson
Streaming Video
Live Video, streamed over the Internet, as well as archived recordings of completed sessions is available on demand through BYU and KSL. We have watched the conference through BYU.tv several years in a row now and love it.
On September 13th my family and I attended the annual Festival of India at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork Utah. The first time I attended the festival was in 1996 and I have returned seven or eight times since then to observe the proceedings and learn about their culture.
Here is a slideshow of photos I took at this year’s festival, including explanatory captions to give those of you who have never been a taste.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jmaxwilson/FestivalOfIndia2008#
The temple building itself is an interesting addition to the Utah landscape, located across the street from the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Church has released a new manual specifically for the Nursery:
Behold Your Little Ones
Behold Your Little Ones PDF
A few years ago, my wife and I were called as the Nursery Leaders for our LDS congregation. We had just moved into the ward from another part of town where I had just been a nursery worker for the last year. I spent a total of two and a half years working in the Nursery.
As nursery leaders, we found that it was very important to have a consistent, repeated order of short activities every week.
Earlier this year I was reading John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity which is more popularly known as “The City on A Hill” sermon.
According to tradition the sermon was given aboard the Pilgrim ship Arbella before landing at what would become the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but recent scholarship suggests that it was more likely given in England before the pilgrims set sail.
The image of the City on a Hill that Winthrop envisioned has become a common American theme.
I am pleased to announce a new LDS Blog Portal focusing on mainstream and orthodox LDS blogs and bloggers:
I will now conclude my critical look at LDS Blog Portals (see Parts 1 , 2 , 3 ).
The most popular of LDS Blog Portals, LDSBLogs.org, is primarily an exercise in self-promotion. In my opinion its claims to promote the church are trumped by its desire to promote itself. This orientation is reflected in the technology itself. It favors blogs by those who are friends or who promote ideas friendly to the fringe mormonism of Dialogue and Sunstone magazines. While they try to walk a line, the conversations featured are often overly and publicly critical of the church and her divinely appointed authorities. While they may lay claim to the name “faithful,” the kind of murmuring that often goes on is not good.
Continuing my series on LDS Blog Portals from Part 1 and Part 2 .
In the previous post I discussed some of the history of LDS Blog portals and how the motivations of those creating the portals played into their design and discussed to some extent how those motivation ultimately affected how the portals are run. Be sure to check out the clarifying comments by the creators of LDSblogs.org on the previous two posts.
Now I would like to look a little at how the self-promotion marketing objective of the portal design has affected usability and technology.
Continued from Part 1: Never Show Your Face Anywhere in the Bloggernacle Ever Again
Blogging itself is still a new technology, and many people are only now becoming aware of LDS Blogs. By its nature, blogging is focused on the present. Things that were posted two or three years ago are ancient history in blog-time. So it is not surprising that the origin of LDS Blog portals is not well known.
The first LDS Blog portal that I remember was Planet LDS. Created by John Hesch and hosted by KZION Radio, originally, Planet LDS ran on the popular python blog aggregation software Planet from which its name was derived. It has since been migrated to run on the popular PHP blog platform Wordpress . I remember visiting Planet LDS as early as 2004 when I first became involved with LDS Blogging and it has been in continual operation since then. While it gets little attention these days when people speak of LDS Blogs, Planet LDS Pioneered the LDS Blog portal concept, paving the way for what was to come.
Last week, after some unfortunately contentious conversations related to my previous blog post, I was unexpectedly delisted from the largest LDS blog portal there is.
As I’m sure you already know, last Sunday the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent an official letter to congregations throughout California asking the members of the church to “do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.” The full letter is available on the official church website.
In an interesting contrast, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States, Barack Obama, has issued a letter of his own addressed to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club which was read at the group’s annual Pride Breakfast. In the letter, not only does he express strong opposition to the California amendment, but he goes even further and advocates “repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.”
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released the results of a new Survey on Religious Belief and Politics in America (pdf).
More than three-quarters of American adults (78%) believe there are absolute standards of right and wrong, with a majority (52%) saying they rely primarily on practical experience and common sense for guidance regarding right and wrong. Far fewer say they rely mainly on their religious beliefs (29%), and fewer still say they rely on philosophy and reason (9%) or scientific information (5%). Only among Jehovah’s Witnesses (73%), Mormons (58%) and members of evangelical churches (52%) do majorities say they rely primarily on their religion for guidance about right and wrong.
Some of the interesting findings:
- 39% of Mormons surveyed agreed to the statement that “Many religions can lead to eternal life” (Compare: Protestant 66%, Catholic 79%, JW 16%, Muslim 56%, Jewish 82%)
- 100% of Mormons Surveyed believe in God in some form (Compare: Protestant 98%, Catholic 97%, JW 98%, Muslim 92%, Jewish 83%, Atheist 21% ??)
The Prophets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have repeatedly emphasized the importance of Motherhood to both the stability and happiness of our earthly society as well as its central importance in the eternal plan for our salvation.
This month, Elder Henry B. Eyring reminds us again of the importance of motherhood in his message from the First Presidency of the Church :
In our own time we have been warned with counsel on where to find safety from sin and from sorrow. One of the keys to recognizing those warnings is that they are repeated. For instance, more than once in general conferences, you have heard our prophet say that he would quote a preceding prophet and would therefore be a second witness and sometimes even a third. Each of us old enough to listen heard President Spencer W. Kimball (1895–1985) give counsel on the importance of a mother in the home and then heard President Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) quote him, and we have heard President Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) quote them both.
Following this counsel from the prophets represents a great sacrifice for many women and men. My own mother made that sacrifice, despite her disinclination toward those things often associated with motherhood, and endured the scorn of her own feminist generation for choosing to stay at home and be a mother. She has since testified that it was the right decision and she has been blessed for her humility.
There is a heartbreaking article by Rebecca Walker , who is the daughter of famed feminist icon and author of “The Color Purple” Alice Walker, where she discusses the damage caused by her mothers fanatical feminism. She says:
A few month’s ago, I arrived late to church and as I scurried across the parking lot with three small children to try to make it in time to take the sacrament, I noticed something so awesome that I just had to stop. Despite our tardiness, the freezing cold, and the fact that we were probably going to miss the central purpose of attending church every Sunday (again!), I fumbled around in my pocket for my phone to snap a picture, trying to ignore the children’s whining remonstrations and arm tugging.
I think that this photo is nicely symbolic. Or it at least implies a story. What it symbolizes, however, or what the story is, is up to you. Submit your photo caption suggestions in the comments or by email.
The winner will be announced next Week.
I have waited to comment on the situation down in Texas where the Texas government has removed over 400 children from their parents with allegations of abuse until there was more information available.
The situation distresses me for a number of reasons.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to go into details here on my blog, but a number of years ago I was involved in a brief legal struggle over some abused children. Having reported abuse to child protection services, I quickly discovered that unless there is physical evidence of abuse (bruises, dislocated or broken bones, etc.), the chances of getting abused children removed from their parents into the safety of state care are practically nil.
It is extremely frustrating and heartbreaking to talk to an abused child who has trusted you and to have to tell them that there is nothing you can do because they haven’t been hurt badly enough yet to deserve protection from the government’s Child Protection Services.
At the same time, through this process I did learn that there are very strong legal protections for parental rights in the United States, and that is something that I strongly support.
