Eight outstanding Utahns, including a high leader in the LDS Church, were honored Tuesday at the 52nd annual Bronze Minuteman Awards Dinner of the Utah National Guard. In a ceremony at the Little America Hotel, the award recipients were President Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake Chamber President Lane Beattie, Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank; Mark and Sally Dietlein of the Hale Center Theater; Master Sgt. (Ret.) Mark B. Harrison; Gail Miller, who built a Utah business empire with her late husband Larry; and, in a surprise announcement, Patti Griffith, who organized the program but was unaware of her award before her name was announced.

Dancing with the Stars has upped the ante this year by including the Empress of Soul, Gladys Knight, as a contestant on their fourteenth season. The seven-time Grammy winner is sure to wow audiences just like she has done on the stage for over 40 years. The vocalist is known for classic soul tracks like "If I Were Your Woman," "Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)," and "Midnight Train to Georgia." In addition, she is BET royalty, receiving the Best Living Legend honoree at the 2008 BET Awards. In an in-depth interview, a jovial Mrs. Knight talked about everything from Dancing with the Stars to Mitt Romney to Tina Turner to the late, great Whitney Houston.

With the groundbreaking of the second LDS temple in the Caribbean, the Church now has 182 temples around the world open, announced, or in construction.

The Latter-day Saint practice of vicarious baptism on behalf of the dead is once again a focus of controversy. In the past few weeks, it's been portrayed in the news media and on the web as unbiblical, ghoulish, bizarre, shameful, vicious, anti-Semitic, immoral, hateful, an exercise in "black magic" and (by some extremists) possibly even illegal. A national television commentator recently named President Thomas S. Monson among "the worst people in the world" for presiding over the practice. It's high time for the view of a very respected non-Mormon scholar to be heard above the noise.

WITH MITT Romney’s candidacy for president, the Mormon church approaches an epochal moment in its deep engagement with American politics. The nation, too, is at a threshold - entering, perhaps, a more spacious public understanding of many once-marginal groups. In the Mormon case, it’s been a long time coming. Romney may be a front-runner for the Republican nomination, and his father George may once have been a serious candidate for president, but the first Mormon to run for president was the first Mormon himself.

Jokes about sacred underpants have reached epidemic proportions, thanks to Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and the musical masterpiece by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, “The Book of Mormon”. But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to give it its full name, is fighting back. A huge advertising campaign features ordinary people doing ordinary things—a white man sporting a beard, a black man sporting a moustache and a young skateboarder flying through the air—with the tag line: “I’m a Mormon.” The snag is, not everyone will buy the idea that Mormons are just like the rest of us. They don’t get drunk. They have large families, stable marriages and a three-month supply of food in the larder in case of Armageddon. They are usually clean-cut and neatly dressed (the facial hair in the “I’m a Mormon” ads is thankfully atypical). And they have a passion for business.

Get the full lesson "Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Witnesses for Christ" from the Teachings of Joseph Fielding Smith at LDS.org.

Among other ideas, The Family: A Proclamation to the World, emphasizes the importance or gender identity and roles. For the purpose of this post, I will focus on several sentences that relate to the responsibilities of parents within the family as they rear children.

“The Lord directed the blessing that I pronounced on this country,” Elder Renlund said. “He will see that it is fulfilled as the people act in faith.”

I’d like to kick the year off with a bit of an introduction to the Doctrine and Covenants, along with some links and suggested reading that will enhance your lesson preparation or participation. Then I’d like to discuss three common ways of reading the scripture. This year holds some important and dramatic differences from any previous cycle through this curriculum. The primary distinction is the availability of the work of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. While Revelations and Translations, Volume 1 (R1) and Volume 2 (R2) (reviewed here and here) are tremendously important, even key to a serious approach to the revelation texts, the Joseph Smith Papers website is almost overwhelming in its documentary and contextual goodness (http://josephsmithpapers.org/). For example, it has the earliest revelation texts in the documents section, the manuscript and published revelations collections in the revelations section, and biographical sketches of all those mentioned in the supplemental materials.