The Church recently released two new Gospel Topics Essays that address the reality of our Heavenly Mother as well as the role of women within the Church.

When we take the time to understand the deep historic and religious significance behind it, the Hosanna Shout becomes less unusual and more sacred.

I have always enjoyed pointing out to my students verses in the scriptures that are about them. Last week as my New Testament students studied John 17, I suggested that certain verses in this great prayer were about them:

It would be a mistake to over-simplify the restoration and purposes of the priesthood, but perhaps an analogy will help us understand what is happening.

Matthew 28; Luke 24; John 20, 21

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 4 of the book "The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith," by Matthew Bowman, published this week by Random House. Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Bowman. All rights reserved. If the Mormons saw themselves as a new Israel, the trek west was inevitably their Exodus. For generations of Mormons, including the one that walked across the prairies, what mattered more than the destination was the act of the journey. It was a collective rite of passage that thousands of Mormons endured, as they had learned to endure all suffering: the death of their prophet, their flight from Ohio and Missouri, and their march across the plains all were taken as divinely sent education, clarifying and refining, testing the bonds that the temple ordinances had created, and they saw God's hand in every bush of berries. Many Mormons were rebaptized upon reaching Utah; they had traveled not only from the United States to the Utah territory but also from the secular realm to God's promised land, reborn into a sacred world. The banks and courts still close in Utah on July 24, the day Brigham Young crossed into the Salt Lake Valley, and the Mormons there celebrate it still, though the number of those who have ancestors who walked across the plains is a fading minority. They have become an archetype.

Help your family remember the pioneers by attending the Castle Valley pageant! Discover Castle Valley, Utah, through an elaborate outdoor historical drama that portrays the settling of the frontier. And don't miss the Pioneer Village, where guests learn about the crafts necessary for a pioneer settlement to survive, such as blacksmithing, farming with horse-drawn implements, weaving, and spinning.

Big news for temples coming to Mendoza, Argentina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Ohio, and Kananga, Democratic Republic of the Congo Temple.

It’s been 175 years since the Mormon Battalion was formed, but only in the past year have historians discovered exactly who served with this historic group.

Famines, pestilences, earthquakes, tribulations, hailstorms, scourges, sickness, commotion, killing, iniquity, blood—these are just some of the calamities prophesied about in the scriptures. But if we “have taken the Holy Spirit for [our] guide,” we will be prepared and need not fear.