"Historical silence surrounding the Book of Mormon has been deafening," Ph.D. Grant Shreve explains. "English departments, especially, have simply pretended it doesn’t exist, quietly building a wall of separation between literary studies and the Book of Mormon."

An 8-year-old boy from an LDS family from Montrose, Pennsylvania, is counted among at least 82 people whose deaths have been linked to Hurricane Sandy. The boy, Matthew Stahl, was killed when an upright branch snapped off a large tree on his family’s property. Someone had come to the door to deliver food for the family’s cattle before the storm had hit the area. Matthew Stahl asked his father if he could go outside to play. The father said no, but the boy ran out anyway, according to President Ken Cooper, first counselor in the Scranton Pennsylvania Stake, who has home taught the family for 16 months. It was calm outside and had not yet started raining, but within less than a minute, a limb of 8 to 9 inches in diameter snapped and fell on the boy.

“I have felt the Lord’s hand in my life as I have progressed through many years,” Elder Echo Hawk said.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been steadily growing in numbers as new converts are learning and accepting the gospel in Russia, a country that has been religiously free since 1990, with the Church having full recognition of it’s presence in Russia since 1991. The current tally of people who have membership in the church is over 22,000, with 7 missions, and 98 congregations. These are exponential numbers since the time Russia opened its doors to allowing missionaries teach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Russian people. To celebrate 23 years of the Church having national recognition, here is a look in to what brought the Church to its current standing in Russia.

"We respect the wise counsel of the medical doctors of Utah. The public interest is best served when all new drugs designed to relieve suffering and illness and the procedures by which they are made available to the public undergo the scrutiny of medical scientists and official approval bodies," the First Presidency said in a statement April 2018.

How eye-opening to learn the history behind this temple that was never built.

The Church has released a gorgeous artistic rendering of the first temple to be built in Thailand—the Bangkok Temple.

Between 1951 and 1962, the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas was the location of exactly 100 above-ground nuclear blasts and hundreds more below-ground tests. The atmospheric tests were the fun ones, of course, you could sit in your hotel room in Las Vegas and marvel at the mushroom clouds some 65 miles away. If you were in the military, you might have an even closer view. These were awesome glimpses of unimaginable power – but not to worry, you were safe: Tests were conducted only when the desert breezes blew away from Las Vegas and the heavily populated Southern California regions beyond. To show you exactly how safe it all was, the federal government even drove carloads of ranchers out to see the Test Site after some blasts (giving the dust a couple of hours to settle safely first, of course).

Did you know that you can send a virtual Christmas Card to your Facebook friends filled with a beautiful Christmas Mormon Messages video? You first choose a pre-designed Christmas card, write a nice holiday message to your facebook friend(s) and then embed your choice of four Christmas-themed Mormon Messages videos including "The Coat" which I highlight below. Click 'Send Card" to post the Christmas Card to the walls of the facebook friends you chose, where they can access the card, watch the video, and send an e- card to their friends if they wish. How nice is this? What a beautiful way to send some virtual greetings, courtesy of the church/Mormon Channel. Speaking of beautiful videos with touching messages, “Do You Have Room?” is the question of this nice post that features the lovely song of the same name by Shawna Edwards. It is just one of the many beautiful musical videos you’ll find featured throughout the Bloggernacle at this time of the year.

If the Utah Hospitality Association has its way, the LDS Church won't be able to talk to state legislators about liquor laws in the future. The UHA, a trade group for bars and restaurants, asked the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City last week to enforce the request as part of its ongoing efforts to overturn parts of Senate Bill 314, which bans daily drink specials and ties the number of liquor licenses to population totals and to the number of state-employed police officers. Frederick Gedicks, who teaches constitutional law at BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School, doesn't think a ban on the church will happen, "You can't single out a religion and say, 'Everyone else gets to lobby the legislature but you.'"