Hundreds of Mormon missionaries assigned to serve in Brazil increasingly find themselves preaching not in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo or Fortaleza, but instead in Philadelphia, Pocatello, Idaho, or even Provo. The LDS Church’s São Paulo Missionary Training Center, which can accommodate up to 700 trainees, currently houses only about 60, none of them U.S. citizens. And the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has lowered the missionary age from 19 to 18 for male Brazilians to make up for the loss of full-time American missionaries.

The sheer beauty of Sunday worship at the Salt Lake Valley LDS First Ward reflects an elemental fact:

Even as an explosion of new broadcast networks and channels splintered the American television market, a little university channel called BYUtv extended its reach to 60 million homes in the first decade of its existence while consistently broadcasting university devotionals, scripture roundtables and other content aimed primarily at Mormons.

Roll out the emerald-green carpet. During May and June, Irish singer Alex Sharpe will rejoin the popular group Celtic Woman on tour, celebrating the popular group’s tenth anniversary.

Has darkness ever overwhelmed you? Have you seen cities sink and communities set ablaze? Has a voice saved you? If you know the Book of Mormon, then you are familiar with the tale I tell. After hundreds of pages chronicling the ebbs and flows of civilizations, the narrative reaches a climax. In Palestine, Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. The world felt the reverberations. “Thick darkness” fell upon the land. Nothing could bring light, “neither candles, neither torches; neither could there be fire kindled with their fine and exceeding dry wood, so that there could not be any light at all.” The sounds of howling and weeping pieced the darkness. Sadness reigned. It is difficult to overstate the drama and the beauty of the Book of Mormon’s rendering of these days. As one who watched silvery strands cloud the corneas of my infant son and darken his vision onto blindness, as one who takes the Christ story seriously in the depth of my soul, and as one who more and more considers the place of the sun and the moon, the land and the sea, in our religious imaginations, this scripture leaves me in tears. It also leaves me spinning about why the Book of Mormon is vital for American religious historians. It is not simply an artifact. It is also a treasure trove of ideas. To me, it should be required reading for anyone in my guild, and here are a few reasons.

Hand-The children of the Demerara Branch in Georgetown, Guyana, have never been to Los Angeles, much less California, but this Christmas the colorful handmade ornaments they inspired adorn one of a dozen Christmas trees that greet holiday guests at the Los Angeles Temple Visitors’ Center.

The only thing that rivals the Mormon church’s ability to spread the word is its ability to cope with emergencies.

NEW YORK – Book Expo America held its annual Benjamin Franklin Award ceremony on June 8 and Utah-based author Lisa Mangum, author of the The Forgotten Locket, the last book in the Hourglass Door trilogy, took first place in the category of Teen Fiction. The award was presented by the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Instead of spending Valentine's Day eating chocolate, this LDS athlete will spend it running 26.2 miles, trying to make it into the Olympics. And did I mention he was the 2015 U.S. champion?

“One thing that I feel very, very strongly about, (is that) families are very, very important,” Mayor Robin Laubaugh said after being named the 2018 Ohio Mother of the Year.