Conference Talk:

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of great new LDS books released each year. With so many important topics broached by insightful authors, figuring out which books to read can seem daunting. Especially when our reading list already includes other must-read items like seminal LDS works, like Jesus the Christ.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints joined with others in the community in Denver, Colorado, on Saturday, July 26, to combat loneliness.

Brooke Romney is a strong believer that we are wired for connection. Connection with those around us, connection with our families, connection with God. “Humans are hard and friendship takes work,” Romney says, but she also believes the effort is worthwhile, “His intent was never for us to walk any of these paths alone.”

Whether it’s art imitating life or vice versa, society at large seems to agree with a prevalent theme of pop culture: nice guys and good girls are boring while bad boys and wild girls are attractive and exciting. Allow me to challenge this frothy fiction with the potency of reality: there is nothing more attractive than someone with a strong conscience.

Connecting FAITH, FAMILY and FUN in one activity with Brick’Em Young!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: I proclaim to you, my brethren and sisters, that in the Book of Mormon more than in any other book written in this world and I do not except the New Testament—in the Book of Mormon more than in any other book, we have there the necessity of, and the truth of the atonement of the Christ taught to the children of men as nowhere else. I rejoice in these truths; may the Lord seal them upon our hearts and give us grace and strength to live in harmony with them, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus. Amen (Brigham H. Roberts, Conference Report, April 1911, p.59).

Not only does the veil keep us from remembering our premortal past, it also keeps us from seeing many things that are going on at the present. God and His angels almost always stay in their hiding places—except on those exquisitely rare occasions when He does part that veil.

Recently, quite a bit of buzz was generated when Elder Ballard stated at a regional broadcast:

Today most of what politicians argue and clamor about devolves down to the distribution of “stuff”—money and materialism—in the furtherance of some relative sense of social justice. As a Latter-day Saint serving as a United States Senator, I never had the sense that the Spirit of the Lord was much a part of these debates, those involving the grubby details of government or of contentious partisanship. Yet, always, I keenly sensed that Providence cared about America and was alarmed by policies that fostered improvident living, dependence and indolence in its people, and all on borrowed money. Another election season soon will be upon us, one with two Latter-day Saints contending for the presidential chair. The central issue for debate that will and should attract our earnest attention is the deplorable condition of the nation’s finances. The nation’s debt clock is rapidly becoming a time-bomb. America cannot long remain simultaneously the world’s super power and the world’s super debtor. All great nations in history have presaged their declines with massive, unsustainable debt, the Roman and British Empires being two obvious examples. Of one thing I am certain: the world will be a poorer and a much more dangerous place if a debt-laden, lethargic America no longer has the strength to lead and foster around the world the values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”