Mormon Bloggers

I have only recently decided to start using the New Family Search of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have all of my family history – genealogy in the old PAF files and I was not too excited to start uploading information on the internet and connect what is already there in my family tree. However now that I have started doing it, I can see already some benefit. The first surprise was to find that someone in Argentina had submitted information about one of my ancestors who lived in Italy. Through the New Family Search I found the email address of this person and I wrote to her. It was a great surprise when she sent me a complete family tree of that ancestor, a family tree that goes back to the year 1623. An article on Deseret News suggest the use of blogs to gather even more information by connecting with people over the Internet. According to the article There are thousands of blogs related to genealogy and family history used by Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Baptists,... Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was walking towards sacrament meeting when an arm appeared out of nowhere; it was heading straight towards my arm. I tried to dodge it, not knowing who’s arm it was I was a little freaked out, but the arm was much too strong for my “school arms.” The arm did in fact belong [...]  Read More →

When Anti-Mormon’s grasp at straws and make caricatures Monitoring Mormon Apologetic Studies, I noticed that in the statistics section of the admin dashboard there were links from Mormon Discussion Forum. For those who are not aware of Mormon Discussion Forums, it is anything but Mormon. It is a discussion forum where some of the most [...]  Read More →

Now and again I hear someone ask when women will receive the Priesthood, which I spell with a capital P to denote that I mean the Priesthood expounded in the D&C as a whole package, including all the covenants. The Priesthood is incomplete without the covenants. It is true, that a woman does not receive [...]  Read More →

Jeffrey R. Holland Quorum of the Twelve Apostles April 2011 Sunday Afternoon Session Conference Talk, parts 1 and 2. More talks from yesterday’s outstanding General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at www.lds.org. Anne Bradshaw Author, True Miracles with Genealogy: Help from Beyond the Veil at http://truemiracleswithgenealogy.com Epic Genealogy Giveaway Starting Soon!  Read More →

We spent an hour with Gary Lawrence last night. He was gracious enough to come up to visit our stake in Camarillo from his home in Orange County. Dr. Lawrence is an American opinion pollster who also happens to be a Latter-day Saint. He has been travelling around the church sharing the results of a poll he conducted in the spring of 2007 on American’s perception of Latter-day Saints in the United States. He published a book in 2008 with the findings of his poll, How Americans View Mormonism: Seven Steps to Improve Our Image. Dr. Lawrence received a PhD in communications psychology from Stanford University in 1972. He said that of over twenty doctoral candidates in his group, he was the only LDS, Republican, conservative hawk among them. So he knows a little about being in the minority. Lawrence Research Now if you know anything about recent events in California, you’ll recognize that Gary’s business, Lawrence Research was the opinion polling company that was heavily involved in Proposition... Read the rest of this entry »

It’s funny how the mind works. Like 600 million other people I keep in touch with friends around the world on Facebook. Several of my friends posted a link today to a YouTube video from Alex Boye, the Relief Society Birthday tribute song. Yes, I know it’s steeped in Mormon culture, but I like what Alex is doing with his talent. One of the comments on the video made reference to Mormon Inc. My mind went back, way back to a flood of memories from my younger days when I was much more interested in the business ventures of the church. At one time I spent several dozen hours conducting first-hand research in the Utah Division of Corporations. I made copies of all the original articles of incorporation for the Corporation of the President, Corporation of the Presiding Bishop, Deseret Management Corporation, Zion’s Securities, Beneficial Financial Group, Bonneville International, Deseret Book, Deseret News, Hawaii Reserves, Farmland Reserve and on and on and on. Many Published Resources I... Read the rest of this entry »

About a thousand other people and I enjoyed an evening with Richard Bushman last night. He spoke about Joseph and Emma for about 40 minutes and then entertained questions from the audience for another 40 minutes. While his insights on Joseph and Emma were interesting, I found the questions more fascinating, because they reflected a lot of the issues I blog about. For those who don’t know, Richard Bushman is the author of Rough Stone Rolling, the 2005 biography of Joseph Smith that has become the definitive account of the prophet’s life as told from the viewpoint of a faithful historian. I took advantage of the opportunity to have him autograph my copy and was not the only one in the audience who waited in line to do so. Open and honest discussion It was wonderful to see so many people interested in learning more about this great man and the beginnings of the Mormon Church. Every time he finished answering a question a dozen more hands shot up. We could have been there for several more... Read the rest of this entry »

“The Lookout,” a Yahoo!News blog, reported today in a story by Liz Goodwin that “an immigrant rights advocate in Utah is trying to provoke the Mormon Church into taking a firmer stand against state-level immigration crackdowns by petitioning the Mexican government to suspend all Mormon missionary visas.” The report states that the advocate, Raul Lopez-Vargas, is circulating a petition, “which accuses the church of not caring about Mexican immigrants because they are mostly Catholic and won’t convert to Mormonism.” Lopez-Vargas reportedly wants the Church to sign the Utah Compact, which states that immigration policy is the domain of federal, not state, authorities. Tony Yapias is quoted as saying that “he suspects the delay in visas for missionaries in Brazil … may be related to the Mormon church’s silence on illegal immigration crackdowns in the United States.” The people behind the petition do not understand the LDS Church’s position at all. They... Read the rest of this entry »

[Edited for some glaring grammatical mistakes, and begging for your understanding regarding the remaining ones.] I’ve been thinking–and of course reading–about the so-called shaken faith thing. What I’m about to say, is given without documentation, just some personal observation. Look forward to my presentation of some of the “hidden” Mormon history (usually “hidden” in the [...]  Read More →

Have you ever been told that we need to make English the official language of the United States? That bilingual nations are inherently problematic? Gather round, and listen to a story: Once upon a time there were two monolingual populations, the Frivvles and the Jibbers, living within a single nation. These groups mostly ignored each other; the only real problem arose when a member of one monolingual culture (the Frivvles) wanted to interact with members of another monolingual culture (the Jibbers) but couldn’t. In such a scenario, the solution seems very clear: any Frivvle that wants to interact with a Jibber will learn Jibberish, and any Jibber that wants to interact with a Frivvle will learn Frivvlesh. They should coexist peacefully, right?Ah, I can hear you objecting–what if one culture is more powerful than the other? What if a vast majority of this society speak Frivvlesh, leaving speakers of Jibberish to cluster together and either A) interact only with other... Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to digress more into this when writing the science/religion post, so I decided to do a post on it,  a short one. Because it doesn’t really require that much room to say, that I don’t see that Orthodoxy is such a big deal for Mormons at all. For some, but certainly when I [...]  Read More →