With a new year, we often need new motivation. Maybe you're convinced this is the year you'll stop eating sugar altogether, or maybe you set a goal to continue doing daily acts of service. Many of us make goals, and all of us fall short at one point or another.

At the start of this year, I got tired of not being able to see the world. So, with careful financial planning, I began my efforts to hit my goal of visiting six continents in six months. I’m already up to three!

After exercising, scripture study, tracting, teaching, helping others, and making meals, missionaries don't have that much spare time in a day. They spend all of it focusing on others and the Lord.

The census is inherently political, even if most people don't see it that way.

Forget running for president or having a show on Broadway–Mormonism’s next big moment is here: BYU athlete Jimmer Fredette has been featured in Lil Wayne’s newest song in the following lyric: “I got a chopper in the trimmer, shootin’ like Jimmer.”

The Quick-Change Artist of Wheat

Anna MacFarlane doesn't really think kids are the worst.

Two new videos posted to the Messages of Christ YouTube channel show the breathtaking beauty of the Provo City Center Temple, covering the devastating fire that gutted and burned the Provo Tabernacle--leaving nothing but ashes inside its skeletal walls--right alongside ravishing images of what it looks like today, now completed and soon to be the 150th temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

On January 15, 2013, the European Court of Human Rights issued judgments on four cases of great significance for the cause of religious freedom. What they say could well have repercussions beyond Europe itself. The European Court operates under the Council of Europe, applying the European Convention of Human Rights in cases that are referred to it from a wide range of European countries. They include those of the European Union, but take in many others, as disparate as Russia and Turkey. These four cases all came from the United Kingdom, and concerned the place of religion, and a religiously formed conscience, in modern European society. Two were about symbols, and were probably themselves symbolic of wider disputes about the place of religion in public life. The other two concerned the reluctance of some Christians to be involved in apparent affirmation of homosexual practices. That is a current flash point in many countries, but it is important to note that the dispute could just as easily have been about other practices abhorrent to some religious consciences. The point of principle at stake is how much importance should be given publically to religiously based principles, particularly in societies that are growing increasingly secular.

As Church membership grows, so do opportunities to serve in the Lord’s vineyard. And while countless opportunities exist within wards, stakes, and local communities, a new corner of the vineyard is opening online.