From Utah to South Africa and Venezuela to Japan, the First Presidency has called 53 new stake presidents and their wives to serve in stakes around the world.

What a powerful thought: "no amount of speculation, questioning, or coaxing will ever make an unprepared young man into a great missionary." The desire to be a missionary, to grow closer to our Father in Heaven, and to learn more about the gospel lies with each of us individually, and no one else.

While standing guard over a Christmas party at the White House, dressed in an elegant red Santa Claus suit, Jim Shea confided to a guest that he was actually a uniformed officer with the U.S. Secret Service.

You've seen the video.

With eight studio albums now under his belt, David Archuleta has come a long way as an artist and individual since his American Idol days. But the journey hasn’t always been smooth. One of the hardest lines the singer said he’s had to straddle is being a Latter-day Saint in a cutthroat music industry.

The updated communication policy for full-time missionaries represents an extraordinary opportunity for missionaries and their families to be more closely linked and more fully aligned in the work of gathering Israel. President Russell M. Nelson has invited members to be anxiously engaged as part of the “Lord’s Battalion” in the latter-day work of ministering and gathering. The availability of weekly communication through various technologies should be applied specifically to strengthen missionaries, bind families and increase faith through united purpose.

The blog Keepapitchinin recently rifled through a series of old Church magazines and rounded up a number of jokes that are so awfully cheesy, it's hard to turn away. Here are some of our favorites. And, for more LDS humor, check out these great posts:

MR says: It's encouraging and comforting to know that in a world that is constantly being filled with evil influences, we have access to another power--one greater than ourselves.

Did you know that LDS general authorities have heroes too?

Mitt Romney can’t quite shake the Mormon question. My Daily Beast colleague McKay Coppins obtained some emails from a Perry evangelical adviser to a “leader in the development of Christian talk radio” showing that at least some within the Perry camp want to keep the issue, as they say, alive. The New York Times reported lengthily Sunday on Romney’s years as bishop of the Boston LDS temple. Christopher Hitchens has now declaimed on Mormonism’s “weird and sinister” belief system (rather tame adjectives, for Hitch). Is all this fair? Or, as Romney and his backers have it, is it religious bigotry? I’m not an expert on religion. But I do think I know a thing or two about politics, and from a nakedly political perspective, Romney definitely has a couple of questions to answer. Religious bigotry has nothing to do with it. Let’s begin with the obvious background. In 1960—121 years after Joseph Smith had an audience with President Martin Van Buren to lay before him the case for action against the persecution of his flock—John F. Kennedy famously established the idea in his Houston speech that there should be no religious test for the presidency. I support this. We all should.