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To Andrew, Ward of the State

Mormon Mentality - Hi Andrew, You were on fire today in Teachers Quorum. You summed up the entire lesson in a 30 second comment. I noticed today that your scriptures are getting read, they seem like they have some wear and tear on them. When you make comments I feel the spirit and I know that you have a real testimony. You are spiritually far more mature then the other teachers. Physically you are big, muscular, and handsome. You have the ability to speak in public and people like you. You shock and surprise me every week considering your background. I know that your...

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Creator of the popular Old Spice ads is a Mormon

Deseret News - He wasn't this popular during a short stint in the NFL, but thanks to the creative minds behind the Old Spice commercial, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like," Isaiah Mustafa was ranked the sixth sexiest man in Hollywood, according to a recent Fox News poll. His commercial has spawned several spoofs, including one at BYU that has garnered attention not only on campus but on YouTube, where it has had more than 2 million views. Ironically, the creator of the Old Spice phenomenon is a BYU graduate. That's right. As No. 3 in the lineup of eight kids, ad man...

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Oliver Cowdery’s Last Testimony

Keepapitchinin - On 20 May 1848, Samuel Whitney Richards and his brother, Franklin Dewey Richards, arrived at Winter Quarters, Nebraska after nearly two years spent on missions in England and Scotland. Franklin and his wife, Jane Snyder, were able to join Uncle Willard Richards’s company about to leave for Utah Territory. However, Samuel and his wife, Mary Haskin Parker, could not come up with money for a “fit-out.” Instead, Samuel rented a thirty-acre farm about four miles from Hunsaker’s Ferry on the Nishnabotna River in what is now Fremont County, Iowa. At that time, though, the farm was in Atchison County, Missouri. This...

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Education Week: Practical suggestions for keeping a spiritual book of remembrance

Deseret News - It was appropriate that Roger C. Flick summarize his presentation about suggestions for preparing a spiritual book of remembrance with a quote from the LDS apostle who diligently kept a journal for most of his life. "Men should write down things which God has made known to them," wrote Wilford Woodruff, fourth president of the LDS Church. "Whether things are important or not, often depends on God's purposes: but the testimony of the goodness of God and the things he has wrought in the lives of men will always be important as a testimony." Flick, a librarian in computer-assisted research services...

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Jews, Mormons and Intermarriage

Jewish Journal - I’ll never forget the first Orthodox rabbi I met in the LA Jewish community. I approached him at a reception and started making small talk with him in Hebrew. When he discovered I was Mormon, he immediately switched to English and became much more animated. It seems that the daughter of a non-Orthodox Jewish friend was contemplating marriage to a Mormon, and this was definitely not kosher with the rabbi. “I don’t get it,” he exclaimed. “Isn’t marriage outside the faith forbidden to Mormons too? Why don’t we work together to prevent this from happening?” We spent the next 30 minutes...

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Why I’m Likin’ Liken… Like a Lichen

LDS Cinema Online - I promise there’s a reason for that title. Really. LIKEN I first encountered the Liken the Scriptures series a few years ago, when I saw them on the shelves of a local LDS bookstore. I was interested, of course, but not willing to commit the purchase price. A while later, we found the franchise’s first title, Nephi & Laban, at the library and decided to check it out. It was the story of Spencer, a young boy who had trouble paying attention in Primary when a caring teacher helped him understand that he could make the scriptures more real by thinking...

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NY Times: Over Time, a Gay Marriage Groundswell

New York Times - Gay marriage is not going away as a highly emotional, contested issue. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage, has seen to that, as it winds its way through the federal courts. But perhaps the public has reached a turning point. A CNN poll this month found that a narrow majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage — the first poll to find majority support. Other poll results did not go that far, but still, on average, showed that support for gay marriage had risen to 45 percent or more (with the rest either opposed or undecided). That’s a...

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How Do You Get Your Way?

Millennial Star - In May 2009 I allowed the BBC Britain to bring two troubled British teens to my home to make a show called “The World’s Strictest Parents.” They brought me two seventeen year olds named Hannah and James. For two days Hannah and James had tantrums and tried every way they could think of to initiate power struggles and force us to become aggressive. This is generally called, “button pushing.” What they didn’t know was that I got rid of all my buttons long ago. On day three the teens were all of the sudden completely different. They were obedient and generally...

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From FHE to national TV (Video)

LDS Church News - Two popular television shows integrated into the Santa Monica 3rd Ward (YSA) family home evening program produced some hoped for, and unexpected, results. Vintage sitcom "The Brady Bunch" was the clever basis for the opening of a video produced to promote family home evening among ward members. The body of the video was recorded during a home evening patterned after the hit television game show "Minute to Win It," which airs on NBC. Young singles who watched the video saw how much fun home evening could be. Meanwhile, staff of "Minute to Win It" show caught the video on YouTube and...

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Mormonism’s ‘9/11 mosque moment’ came in 1903

Salt Lake Tribune - Before a proposed mosque in Manhattan focused the nation’s attention on “terroristic” tendencies of everyday Muslims, Mormons faced the same scrutiny. The Mormon “9/11 Mosque” moment happened more than 100 years earlier. In 1903, the Utah Legislature elected LDS Apostle Reed Smoot as U.S. senator from Utah (this was before the 17th Amendment, which provided for election to the Senate by popular vote). The vote in the Legislature broke along party lines: 46 for Republican Smoot, 16 for his Democratic rival. The nation nearly had kittens. Pent-up suspicion and venom against Mormons erupted in furious broadsides by Christian ministers, politicians and...