I laugh every time I think about a text I got from Emily Belle Freeman this summer.

You are invited to join thousands of faithful Latter-day saints from across the world for the Firm Foundation Expo, the largest LDS event of its kind coming to the Utah Valley University Events Center the weekend after general conference, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, April 6th, 7th, and 8th.

In the final months of 1938, the shadow of war was spreading across Europe. Meanwhile, a twenty-nine-year-old Nicholas Winton was preparing for a ski vacation in Switzerland, until his plans drastically changed.

Elizabeth Smart made headlines this month when she advocated for human trafficking survivors at a conference hosted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Smart this year – I made her kidnapping (or rather Jon Krakauer’s treatment of Smart’s captivity in his inexorable Under the Banner of Heaven) the focal point of a national conference paper and a key element of my dissertation chapter on anti-Mormon religious intolerance. But I missed that she’d spoken at this conference until the blogosphere erupted over her alleged condemnation of abstinence-based sex education. During her 13 minute presentation, Smart recounted the details of her captivity and emphasized the need to teach children that they have intrinsic worth, regardless of how others might abuse or exploit them. She further noted that “one of the questions that is most commonly asked [of her] is ‘well, why didn’t you run away? Why didn’t you yell? Why didn’t you scream?’”

As Mitt Romney becomes the first LDS candidate to secure a major party presidential nomination, Mormon women will be watching with special interest. Then again, we have always been interested in politics. Mormon women in Utah enjoyed the right to vote as early as 1870—a time in American history when many women rejected political involvement as the proper domain of men, and fully five decades before the achievement of U.S. women’s suffrage.

The recent death of a newsman drew some unlikely praise from those who admired him. And it wasn't just for his skills as a writer and reporter. McCandlish Phillips was also a religious man who left The New York Times at the top of his game to become an evangelist.

In the Church video “You Are His Child,” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles reminds others of God’s unceasing justness and kindness.

One of the miracles of the restoration of the gospel includes the mechanical process that generated 269,528 words of the text of the Book of Mormon. Using the seer stone in ways he never explained, Joseph Smith spoke the words to his scribes, who recorded them with quill pens.

A 90-year tradition resurfaces this week when the annual Campus Education Week is conducted on the Brigham Young University campus. Launched in 1922 as "Leadership Week" with a strict orientation toward training lay leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Campus Education Week has evolved through the years into five days of classes, workshops and experiences in a wide variety of disciplines intended to enhance life-long learning.

“Bula!” While it may be Fiji’s overwhelming humidity that hits you first, it’s the wide smiles and friendly faces that stay with you. On this island, where paradise consists of blankets of greenery and sandy beaches leading into pristine, aqua waters, happy members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abound—Saints who choose to put the gospel before everything else.