Baptism is not the last step to conversion. In the case of one bishop, it was just his first step in what became a very long, rocky, and interesting road to finally accepting the Church.

I’ll never get over just how motivating it was to see the baptismal photos from around the world that lined the halls of the Provo MTC. “Just one soul”, I’d say to myself as I walked on by.

Ingredients

“The less time you spend on social media, the more healthy you will be—physically, mentally, and socially,” said Robert R. Wright, director of the Health Psychology Emphasis in the BYU–Idaho Psychology Department.

The outlaw Butch Cassidy was born as Robert LeRoy Parker on 13 April 1866 in Beaver, Utah, son of Maximilian Parker (a 12-year-old handcart pioneer of 1856) and Ann Gillies Parker (a 9-year-old traveler with the Hodgetts Company, the wagon company that followed after the Martin Handcart Company and shared their disastrous experiences in the Wyoming blizzards). While Robert Parker was still a small child, the family moved across the mountain range to the smaller, newer town of Circleville in Piute County. All the evidence (and I’m something of a Piute County history fanatic), the Parkers were an industrious, well respected, compassionate family. I find Max Parker, for example, riding almost 50 miles on horseback to the nearest telegraph station to send word to distant family members that Max’s neighbor – a passenger with Sam Brannan on the 1846 Brooklyn voyage to San Francisco – had died in a cabin fire in 1897. The next year, Max drove a wagon all the way to Salt Lake City to take a neighbor with appendicitis to the hospital. Max’s obituary reflects his neighbors’ opinion of his service: “He was a quiet, unassuming man and was often called the silent giver.” Butch, on the other hand … well, everybody knows something about the outlaw Butch.

Did you know the Hamilton New Zealand temple and an adjacent Church college were built almost entirely by volunteers?

Twelve hymns of the Church’s new global hymnbook—including “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”—will be available on May 30, 2024.

Recently, I experimented with diving a little deeper into the Book of Mormon, reading, experiencing, and examining it in an entirely new way—through text analysis.

The following is an excerpt from President Oaks' book Life's Lessons Learned.

“Some [patriarchs] may see the words ... and some may hear them. Others may just have impressions and feelings as to what they should say.”