Simple Utah Mormon Politics

I wish I'd had my tape recorder!  One of the things that I love about my 25-plus years of employment at BYU is the opportunity to have regular discussions about Jesus Christ and his gospel. We had a really good one in our team meeting yesterday.  Here's what I learned/thought about during or as a result of that discussion.

Here are some interesting things that I thought of while studying Alma chapters 30 and 31 in the Book of Mormon for LDS Sunday School class last week.

In a 1984 LDS General Conference talk, Elder Ronald E. Poelman of the Quorum of Seventy made a statement that is exactly what the Church needed to hear at that time.  And it's especially something that would assuage a lot of anger between warring camps in the Church today.  Why don't we know about it? Because someone (it's not clear who) in the general leadership of the Church didn't like it, and required Poelman to re-deliver the talk with that part of the talk replaced by something different.

A Mormon historian recently said that we as Mormons need to "reconstruct the narrative" of the LDS Richard Bushman Church, because what we've been telling is somewhat of a sanitized version.  A believing member of the Church, Richard Bushman welcomes the healthy reconstruction that has been officially sanctioned by LDS Church leadership in recent years. Interestingly, another Mormon historian, nearly 35 years ago, attempted to do the same thing but was shut down when he suggested that the narrative needed to be reconstructed--to be told more accurately and openly.  Here is that story.

It would be difficult to find a religion that speaks more highly of women and their eternal potential than does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Here are some of those teachings.

High school graduation speeches are often so much, "rah, rah, rah!" cheerleading, that they can probably make at least a few high school graduates unnecessarily feel like failures.  So, as a member of the American Leadership Academy (Spanish Fork, Utah) board of trustees, when I was asked to speak at graduation, I prepared an unconventional high school graduation speech.  I told them about how difficult high school was for me.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from April 2016 LDS General Conference.