A Beginner's Guide to Celebrating Advent

You wouldn't think singing the cover song for Pepsi's new YouTube channel would be a spiritual experience. But for Alex Boye, his faith played a large role in this incredible experience.

This year’s celebration had a special focus on the 100-year anniversary of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ being preached in South America.

“There will be a convergence of discoveries (never enough, mind you, to remove the need for faith) to make plain and plausible what the modern prophets have been saying all along…[I] do not expect incontrovertible proof to come in this way…, but neither will the Church be outdone by hostile or pseudo-scholars.” (Neal A. Maxwell) In 1997 a group of Latter-day Saints who frequented the Mormon message boards of America Online found that they were responding to the same LDS-critical arguments over and over. They decided to form a non-profit organization so they could share information and create a repository of responses. That organization was The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, or FAIR. In 1999 FAIR held their first conference in Ben Lomond California. A large percentage of the few who attended this first conference were the speakers themselves. Two weeks ago FAIR held their fifteenth annual conference in Provo, Utah, with about 400 attendees.

For the third year in a row, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is providing a grant to the nine national refugee resettlement agencies in the United States. Representatives of Latter-day Saint Charities, the humanitarian organization of the Church, were on the East Coast this week to hold discussions and deliver a $4 million grant, which includes $1.2 million in cash and $2.8 million in commodities.

“Teenagers don’t always get credit for being empathetic, but that’s all this was—pure love and the desire to minister like Christ.”

Isn’t it harder than ever to really disconnect, to escape the constant flood of information and social media and this and that and on and on? It is and the irony is that, in this state of constant connection, nonstop information, and Wi-Fi-enabled everything, we can still feel disconnected from the people and things that matter most. That’s why sometimes the best thing we can do is unplug from the distractions, disconnect from the buzz and static, get ourselves some wide-open spaces and some of that old reliable cure-all—fresh air—and reconnect.

Apostle Photos: When They Were Called

There’s one teaching of Jesus Christ that author Emily Belle Freeman thinks about regularly.

The LDS Church is surveying its members about their readership of key websites and Mormon writers, a move that reflects the faith’s growing interest in managing its public image as two Mormon candidates make headlines pursuing the White House. Church officials confirmed this week that the survey on a range of social, political and doctrinal matters — including the trustworthiness of specific journalists — is partly intended to gauge how and where Latter-day Saints get their information on LDS-related issues.