It is a privilege to speak to you today as your bishop, but also a responsibility that deeply humbles me. I pray that the Spirit will be with me.
First, let me address one of the most important groups in our congregation today—the Primary children. This meeting is going to be a little longer than normal, so all of you in the Primary please feel free to stand up and shake your arms for a few seconds.
Families Are Forever is a short film about a Latter-day Saint family, the Montgomerys, living in central California who have a gay son who came of age during Proposition 8, the California initiative to affirm the definition of marriage as being between one woman and one man. Explaining their active involvement in supporting the initiative, the mother, Wendy, says, “If the Church asks you to do something, you do it.” Her son Jordan, whose homosexuality was unknown to his parents at the time, overheard them talking about the “disgusting” and “horrible” people who opposed Prop 8.
Moroni and the Swastika arose, in part, as a response to a query put to the author about the persecution of Mormons in the Third Reich. David Conley Nelson describes how his stepson, raised on the stories of Mormon persecution and Latter-day Saints’ willingness to endure much for the sake of the gospel, made the inference that Mormons must have been among the victims of Nazi Germany. This query led to a research paper, a presentation at the Mormon History Association’s annual meeting, and ultimately a doctoral dissertation and a book.
David Conley Nelson’s Moroni and the Swastika, although based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, is not at heart a scholarly book. It is, rather, a polemical work dressed up in academic regalia. While its footnotes and bibliography give it the appearance of scholarly earnest, its primary commitment is not to placing events in historical context, or to giving a balanced account of primary sources and secondary literature, or to weighing the evidence for or against a given proposition, but to launching accusations against Mormons in Nazi Germany and LDS Church leaders in the United States.
My mom held her hand over the phone. “It’s Reed,” she whispered. I took the phone and leaned against the countertop. “Hello,” I said. “Hello.” “What, Derrick? No call?” Reed asked. “I didn’t know you…
We create ourselves as we go:
memories folding inward
like bread dough kneaded,
brain convolutions, or
tangible patterns on the shore.
Lightning’s no easy light to see alive reflecting
Joseph’s mind : No magic bottle holds it nor do I
Believe it possible, try as I will to engage in mirrors
As images : how can I imagine what ignited flashing glass
Sobbing boughs above me bend,
Throbbing red in August wind.
in mankind is the end of kind
in woman the beginning of woe
A child, a little girl of four,
a balled string of curiosity,
had to touch the canvas