Ask just about anyone from Santa Clara, Utah, about “the call” and there’s no mistaking what you mean: The time the Swiss Mormons rolled in and changed everything.

Underneath The Host's schmaltzy romance and blinding shine of silver sports cars lies a challenging theme of identity and existence, both Earthly and beyond. The concepts are deepened with a little background information: the movie is based on a book of the same name by Stephenie Meyer, best known for penning the Twilight series. Meyer is also one of the most successful authors to come out of the Mormon faith. Viewed through a lens of the uniquely American religion, The Host ends up more of a refraction of those beliefs than anything found in her vampiric romance saga.

For Nate and Kacee Houle, life and running are inseparable. The couple met as employees at a running store, 26.2, in American Fork. They were both collegiate runners, Nate at Southern Utah University and Kacee at the University of Utah and later at Georgia State University. Until two months ago, Nate was a cross-country coach at SUU.

The surge of new full-time missionaries entering its existing Missionary Training Centers has prompted The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to announce it will close a high school it operates in Mexico City and convert it into an MTC that will accommodate missionaries called to serve in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Elder Russell M. Nelson and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, both members of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, presided at a Tuesday night meeting during which the establishment of what will be the church’s second-largest MTC was announced. The meeting was held on the campus of the church’s privately owned high school, Benemerito de las Americas, which will be closed and its facilities used for the new MTC.

In the happiest town in the whole USA, candy shops outnumber bars. Downtown parking is free. Nobody smokes.

To understand why Mitt Romney persists in the face of rejection, opposition and indifference from his own party, look no further than the two and a half years he spent in France, getting up at 6:30 a.m. every day to venture forth and have doors slammed in his face for 10 hours. The fresh-faced Latter-Day Saints who came to France in the late 1960s to preach the message of Jesus Christ — of whom Republican presidential candidate Romney is the best known — discovered a secular and skeptical populace, and few willing converts.

The BGEA legitimized a group that has been excoriated for decades as anathema to good ol’ American values. In a simple—and, perhaps precipitous—move, the BGEA has made Mormons like me normal. I confess that I’m going to miss the cult lifestyle. Staying up all night. Carousing with ne’er-do-wells. Terrorizing farm animals. Plotting to destroy the constitution. I remember, like it was yesterday, worshiping Stephen R. Covey for my 16th sixteenth birthday. Sigh. Once they’re gone, those days don’t come back.

At the beginning of Lehi in the Desert, the late, legendary Hugh Nibley reviews the distinguished American archaeologist William F. Albright’s criteria for determining the historical plausibility of the Middle Egyptian tale of Sinuhe, which Albright considers to be “‘a substantially true account of life in its milieu’ on the grounds (1) that its ‘local color [is] extremely plausible,’ (2) it describes a ‘state of social organization’ which ‘agrees exactly with our present archaeological and documentary evidence,’ (3) ‘the Amorite personal names contained in the story are satisfactory for that period and region,’ and (4) ‘finally, there is nothing unreasonable in the story itself.’”[i] Nibley then asks about the story of Lehi: “Does it correctly reflect ‘the cultural horizon and religious and social ideas and practices of the time’? Does it have authentic historical and geographical background?

Martin’s Cove Wyoming: the rugged west, cowboys, horses, plentiful wildlife and a lot of Mormon pioneer history. There are many things to do and learn in the great outdoors in America’s 44th state.

On Dec. 25, 1964, as Mitt Romney enjoyed his last Christmas break as a high school student in Michigan, two Mormon missionaries visited Darius Gray in Colorado Springs and asked him if he had any last questions before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He had one. A proud African American, Gray expressed wariness over a description in the Book of Mormon of a dark-skinned tribe being out of favor with God and asked, “How, in any way, does that relate to me?” The younger of the two missionaries stood off to the side as his senior companion explained, “‘Well, Brother Gray, the primary implication is that you won’t be able to hold the priesthood.’”