All Posts

As I read the Beatitudes, delivered again by Jesus in 3 Nephi 12, I think of eight women who exemplified or perfectly described these attributes in real life. All of the following stories are true. Some of the names have been changed.

When Bethany and I had turned in our final draft of Girls Who Choose God: Stories of Strong Women from the Book of Mormon, we breathed a deep sigh of relief. So good to be done! As it worked its way through several committees and processes, we were resting easy. However, when the proof came back to us and we read through the scriptures for a final check, I flinched. We had made a serious error and described the scene with the children and Christ WRONG.

I also think of the oft-repeated image of Christ as the mother hen, who gathered her chickens under her wings and nourished them, and who would gather her chickens under her wings and nourish them, if they would let her. Just one instance of this is found in 3 Nephi 10:5-6.

Jesus’s visit to the Americas is a life’s ministry condensed into just a few brief but powerful encounters. The parallels between Christ’s actions and teachings in the Old and New World are significant: he healed the sick, preached a new gospel that replaced the Law of Moses, instituted the sacrament, ordained a priesthood, and prayed with and for the people. In 3 Nephi 22 – 26, as his visit neared its close, Christ taught from written text, or holy scripture.

In 3 Nephi 27, the disciples ask Jesus what they should call the church. Jesus instructs them they should call it in his name because it is his gospel. As members of this church, we believe this is Christ’s church. We strive to live the teachings of his gospel. We perform ordinances in his name. We take his name upon us when we are baptized and we renew this covenant every week when we take the sacrament. We even conclude our prayers in his name.

I remember in high school in Provo, Utah, one girl in my class was not Mormon. I recall feeling true sorrow for her position, sorrow at the fact that her parents drank wine and she wore sleeveless dresses to the dances. I was not the only one to feel sorry for her as she was so clearly part of the “world.” It didn’t take me long past my high school years to question my own righteous concern for this girl and her family, who I’d never met in person, and not long after that to

In true prophetic style, Moroni takes us to task (literally us, in this modern era). He accuses thus: “Ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted” (Mormon 8:37). (Notice his emphasis here is on what/whom we love. I can imagine that sometimes we help the poor and the needy out of duty rather than love.)

I’m not sure anyone even knows I left the Church. I continued to go through the motions of activity long after they had ceased to bring me the joy and peace I had known in the gospel most of my life. This sensation of finding darkness and confusion in the very places and activities that had formerly been a source of light and surety was so overwhelming that I finally had to acknowledge to myself that in my heart, I had been gone for a long time.

Recently in an interview, I was asked what I considered most important as I learned to deal with inequities in the church and in life, and what I thought was most important as I taught students to deal with those inequities themselves. I believe and I want to teach my students that the Spirit is the most important thing.

One day a celebrity actress boarded my subway car as I was commuting from Brooklyn into Manhattan. She was in sunglasses and sandals, alone with her little daughter strapped on in a baby carrier. She sat down across from me, and the woman next to her immediately complimented her baby without showing any awareness that she was talking to a famous person.

Moroni. He stands atop most of our temples in gold blowing a trumpet proclaiming the restoration to all. He mentored the young Joseph Smith through visitations – directed him and refined his character. He witnessed the genocide of the Nephites, protected the golden plates and spent his last days in hiding writing the things of most import for the benefit of the Lamanites.

The binary of good and evil seems easy to grasp, easy to follow, and in theory, it is easy to spot much of the good in the world, and much of the evil. I find, however, that this pairing of words, which in the pairing leaves little space in between, and little space to work introspectively, is most difficult to grapple with when we are asked to delineate within ourselves the “good and the evil.”

To begin our Sunday School supplement for Doctrine and Covenants and Church History, I want to address two central difficulties I see with focusing on women and the gospel specifically in our study material for this year. Firstly, it is the Doctrine and Covenants itself. In comparison with the biblical text and the Book of Mormon text, even a smaller percentage of the new revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants directly involve women.

These early lessons in this year’s Church History (D&C) curriculum are organized thematically, rather than chronologically or by section, so this week’s lesson attempts to explore the character of Jesus Christ as represented in the Doctrine and Covenants. As we jump around the book to the various scriptures referenced in the lesson, we encounter many first person statements by the Lord Himself (D&C 19 for example) and we also encounter sections which refer to the Lord in thir

Lucy Mack Smith sought a pure inner Christianity, to the extent that she had difficulty joining any particular Christian sect. Two years before she gave birth to Joseph, Lucy became very ill with a fever and feared the thought of death. She wrote, “I did not consider myself ready for such an awful event, inasmuch as I knew not the ways of Christ; besides, there appeared to be a dark and lonesome chasm, between myself and the Saviour, which I dared not attempt to pass.”