Opinions & Features
When our heroes fall - especially the LDS ones
Mormon Life says: What happens when those we look up to (Church leaders, popular speakers, role models) make a mistake or have an unsavory part of their life exposed?
"Cursed is he who putteth his trust in a former beauty queen." That is the title of a blog post my friend wrote last week, shortly after discovering that former Miss Utah Elizabeth Craig had been...
Mission group still together after 50 years
While many missionary groups enthusiastically hold reunions for a few years and then lose interest, one group is still meeting regularly after 50 years. These Mormon missionaries served under President Harold I. Bowman in the Spanish-American Mission between 1953 and 1958. This mission was...
BYU grad hoping family dinner will change the life of a child
In the movie "The Blind Side," an underprivileged young man known as “Big Mike” is given love and opportunity by a Good Samaritan, changing his life forever. A BYU graduate is trying to recreate a similar program for disadvantaged children. Valerie Barker, a 27-year-old BYU valedictorian...
Opposition to Mormonism started early
Many critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claim the advent of the Internet and free access of information created their critical view of Mormonism. A new collection of early writings about the Book of Mormon, however, demonstrates that new technology isn't a prerequisite for...
Orson Scott Card: Do it anyway
Mormon Life says: This is great advice.
Martina McBride, one of the great country voices, sings a deceptively simple lyric in the song "Do It Anyway." She gives several examples of actions that can seem futile -- building something...
High Fashion Meets High Standards
52 Young Women from seven different high schools came together for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to walk the runway in a fashion show put on by professional stylists, makeup artists, hair stylists, and 25 local vendors to celebrate “fashionable modesty”. Walking a 40 foot runway to the pulsating...
Brazil missionary, convert rejoice together after 45 years
Mormon Life says: This is really very touching.
When Curtis Broadbent was a Mormon missionary in Brazil in the early 1960s, he met a teenager named Aldo Francesconi. Broadbent taught Francesconi, who was baptized just before he turned 17, and...
To abandon marriage is to abandon children
To abandon traditional marriage is to abandon children, said a speaker at the Stand Up for Family Student Symposium at BYU on Saturday, March 6. Professor William C. Duncan, director of the Marriage Law Foundation and a family law teacher at the university, said that children -- whom marriage is...
Love keeps 99-year-old Mormon convert going
Anna Carlson believes love -- loving others and being loved -- is why she has lived to be 99 years old. "I just love everybody, and for some reason they all love me," she said recently from her retirement center home near the Jordan River Temple. And now that the one-year anniversary of her...
An early morning start for seminary students in Chicago
Mormon Life says: Early morning seminary students should get an extra special diploma. Just my opinion.
After arising at 4:50 each school-day morning, 16-year-old Sonia Brown leaves home at 5:25 to make her way by Chicago Transit Authority bus and train through the streets of the third-largest city in...
Why aren't other peoples mentioned in the Book of Mormon?
Last week it was explained that the Lehites were a small incursion into a larger existing New World population. Such a position raises at least two questions: 1. If the Lehites met "others" in the New World, why are they not mentioned? 2. What about those verses that imply that the Lehites were...
The many Hugh Nibley courtship story myths
Imagine, if you will, that Hugh Nibley is stuck like Bill Murray in the movie "Groundhog Day" -- except instead of repeating the same day over and over, the magic of folklore is creating multiple stories of how Nibley found love and marriage at BYU. William A. Wilson, an emeritus professor of...
What is the definition of 'anti-Mormon'?
I have often heard the criticism that Latter-day Saints classify everyone who disagrees with our beliefs as "anti-Mormon." Of course, the people who say this are usually anti-Mormons. Am I proving their point? I don't think so. I actually agree that this is a problem in our church. After all, our...
Of children, eggs and screeching
My son, Geoffrey, and his wife, Heather, have two daughters, Zoe (4) and Phoebe (2). Quite apart from the fact that these children are of extraordinary intelligence and virtue, they're quite normal. So parents everywhere will understand this story, even if their children have not found such...
BYU students solve Mormon mysteries
The questions usually start simply enough. As the full-time editors of each volume of the Joseph Smith Papers program comb through the journals, histories and other documents of Joseph Smith, questions will pop up from the history of a reference to a meeting's minutes, mail or weather at a...
