And I want to open up By Common Consent to that seasonally-appropriate attitude. Because even with everything that's going on in the United States and the world, recognizing and being grateful for our blessings is powerful, both societally and for our own souls.

My youngest child, H, loves the story of “Jesus coming out of the water,” aka, Jesus’ baptism. Almost every time we read scriptures, she'll ask for this story. One night, I started at the beginning of Matthew 3, and got as far as verse 4 before our real discussion started:

I'd forgotten that the Saturday evening session of LDS General Conference had been canceled before. Given this week's announcement that President Oaks is eliminating the Saturday evening session I made this timeline.

If you've ever wanted a step-by-step guide to finding a therapist that understands how the church fits with your needs -- you've come to the right place! Here are 5 questions that will help you find an LDS therapist that is right for you. (Note: most of these tips apply to finding a therapist in general)

Before I begin, I acknowledge that the ideas in this post do not have full consensus, though a number of prominent theologians have proposed ways to understand Jesus’s mission that are similar to the language in this post.[1] And based on my experience within the modern LDS church what follows doesn’t get to much airtime in church meetings (local or church-wide).

This afternoon, ICE agents parked outside of a church in Charlotte, NC. They rushed onto church grounds, and grabbed people who were doing yard work at the church, while their children were playing and their spouses were cooking. Because of the incursion of ICE, the "church is suspending services and yard work until members feel safe to gather again without the threat of immigration raids."

When it comes to religion, immigration is not a left-right issue. Rather, the dignity of immigrants finds roots in Christian and Restoration scripture, in our history and rhetoric. Protecting the dignity and rights of immigrants is an issue that has significant moral consequences. The USCCB's rare Special Message has underscored the role that major religious bodies have in guarding that dignity, and provides a pathway and model for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to add its voice to the emergent choir.

Reinterpreting Polygamy and the Mormon Theology of the Afterlife The July 12, 1843 revelation (D&C 132) made no reference to sealing dead partners or the living to the dead, though a vital subtext was the endurance of sealing beyond death. For the day of April 3, 1836, a clerk entered this account into Joseph Smith’s diary: "The vail was taken from their minds and the eyes of their understandings were opened.

It is time again for the annual Christmas Gift Book Guide!

As much as D&C 132 can teach us about experiences of abuse, women of the restoration also point the way forward and show us how the Lord “restore[s] all things.”

The events at Broadview represent the most significant attacks on religious liberty by the federal government that I can think of in my lifetime. Even if the church does not involve itself---and it should!---as members of the church, we can and should demand that the federal government respect religious exercise and that it follow the Free Exercise clause and RFRA.

Most science vs. religion arguments in the realm of cosmology are very outdated, taking into account neither new scientific hypotheses nor the work of a new generation of philosophers. I would invite interested readers to follow the work of Durham's Phillip Goff in this area, whose arguments for the existence of God are representative of this new debate. I find him to be an honest thinker who responds well to being proven wrong.

Once upon a Tempernacle, I was a brand-new missionary in a small Utah town. We had temple trips twice per transfer, and my companion and I usually went with our district leader and his companion. Every temple trip, once we got to the Celestial Room, my district leader would walk behind me and whisper phrases from D&C 132 in my ear, hijack meaningful conversations to get my take on whether it was even worth it for women to go to the Celestial Kingdom as plural wives, etc.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Utah is in the midst of a massive rethinking of its homelessness policy. And the direction that Utah is moving, while consonant with Donald Trump's vision of dealing with homelessness, is inimical to both policy and LDS thought. I should say upfront that Utah isn't unique in moving toward ineffective and counterproductive homelessness policy: California governor Gavin Newsom has been…

Gospel Tangents and Exponent II have collaborated to bring you a LDS Calendar of Events that includes unofficial LDS symposia, retreats, and conferences.

Joseph F. Smith reflected in 1878 that, when written, the text of D&C 132 “was not then designed to go forth to the church or to the world. It is most probable that had it been then written with a view to its going out as a doctrine of the church, it would have been presented in a somewhat different form.”

  Last week I attended the "Kansas Summit for Religious Freedom," a gathering designed to provide representatives of multiple different faith traditions here in Wichita, KS--Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Buddhist, and more--to share thoughts about and perspectives on religious pluralism. The theme of the gathering--which was primarily organized and paid for, as readers of this blog can no doubt guess, by the LDS Church; the main sponsoring organization, the…

This week we’re going to talk about the end of D&C 121, verses 41-46. This is a very-often-discussed scripture in LDS circles, and I’m going to sidestep the most common points of conversation on it. (What did “reproving betimes with sharpness” mean in the 1830s? Go ask your Sunday School teacher.) Instead, let’s talk about the covenant in these verses…

Earlier this week, ICE kidnapped a member of the church here in Chicago. This member is here legally. He has work authorization. He has not committed any crimes. He has complied with all of the things that we expect immigrants to comply with.

Previous parts: More on the Metaphysics of Polygamy and its Influence on the Proclamation: LGBT On heavenly sex as the source of human souls, Brigham Young would add another twist: the Gods (the revelation—D&C 132 names women as Gods as well as men) always came to those created worlds themselves and sired/birthed the first human physical bodies, thus beginning the incarnation of their own spirit progeny.

We lost a beloved pet recently. Books always soothe my heartache and I ended up doing a deep dive on Christian views of animal ensoulment. Inspired by a recent book by a Jesuit scholar, I have been exploring what a soteriology of animals looks like in the Catholic tradition over in my personal space. The stuff about salvific relationality and…

Recently, Taylor Petrey published an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune in which he argued that The Family Proclamation should be read as “commentary” rather than “revelation.” To be clear, he did not mean that the document is therefore irrelevant. Rather, it belongs to a different genre than revelation. Commentary, he says, “may founds underwhelming” but it is “one of the oldest and most important genres in religion.” Commentary is a means of making sense of revelation, looking from our current view and embedded with our current biases.

D&C 121:36-39 describes a slippery slope into using the priesthood as a tool of power and control to commit abuse, along with consequences for priesthood holders who do so. This is one of the clearest, most poignant, and most powerful condemnations of abuse in all of scripture. It’s also not straightforward to put into practice. Let’s dive in.

Anyway, in light of the Deseret News's skepticism of the accessibility of non-English language music, and as a follow-up to my Bad Bunny post on Friday, I figured I'd ask all of you smart people: what are your favorite songs and albums in languages other than English? I'll start, though I'll confess that my start isn't ask exciting as I'd like it to be, since my picks are in my mission language (Portuguese) or albums I first heard on my mission (Spanish).

Two days ago, Jennifer Graham, the Ideas and Culture Editor for the Deseret News, wrote an op-ed entitled "The Super Bowl halftime show will be even worse than we think." She is, of course, talking about Bad Bunny, who will be performing the halftime show at Super Bowl LX. Why does she think Bad Bunny will be even worse than we (whoever "we" is) think?