Supplement from "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" by The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles

LDS Church involvement in religious liberty issues extends to the earliest days of the history of the church, when Latter-day Saints experienced firsthand the harshness of religious persecution. Church founder Joseph Smith said in 1843 that "if it has been demonstrated that I have been willing to die for a Mormon, I am bold to declare before Heaven that I am just as ready to die in defending the rights of a Presbyterian, a Baptist, or a good man of any other denomination; for the same principle which would trample upon the rights of the Latter-day Saints would trample upon the rights of the Roman Catholics, or of any other denomination, who may be unpopular and too weak to defend themselves."

Matthew Bowman is a Ph.D candidate in American religious history at Georgetown University and associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He blogs about Mormon history at The Juvenile Instructor.

The first two times Marcus Menti saw “Freetown,” a religious thriller about missionaries trying to escape the unrest of the Liberian Civil War, he couldn’t stay for the whole movie.

Not many wives would trust their husbands to do their makeup, let alone when their husbands can't see what they're doing.

As a professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University (1972-2011), I have rationally defended the restored gospel in local, national and international venues. Indeed, in all my published work, I have done nothing else. Yet my own conviction of the restored gospel is not based on philosophical or theological reasoning; it is grounded in personal manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Though these are sacred experiences, not often communicated or communicable, I share one such experience here. Several years ago I attended an eight-week Institute in the Philosophy of Religion at Eastern Washington University in Bellingham, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Institute was directed by Professors William Alston and Alvin Plantinga and included as faculty some of the most prominent philosophers of religion in both the U.S. and Great Britain.

I continually encounter the confident declaration that the witnesses to the Book of Mormon didn’t really see or touch anything at all and didn’t actually claim to have seen or touched anything. They only “saw” the plates with their “spiritual eyes,” I’m assured, and “spiritual eyes,” to them, meant “in their imaginations.”

All the BYU choirs and the BYU orchestra collaborated with the Church to help #LighttheWorld with a music video that reminds people of the love and charity that makes Christmas the best time of year. Watch as BYU Combined Choirs sing this beautiful arrangement of "Wishes and Candles."

I (Tracy) was flying from North Carolina into Utah to co-host "Living Room Conversations" between gay people like me and Mormons, with a friend from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jacob Hess. We had recently collaborated on a workshop at the National Coalition of Dialogue and Deliberation exploring how to work with diverging "sacred convictions" in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. Since then, Jacob and I had developed an unlikely friendship.

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.