Today, perhaps more precisely than at any time in history, the prophecy of the visiting angel Moroni is being fulfilled that Joseph’s name “should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people” (Joseph Smith — History 1:33).

via LDS Church News

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marked the Western landscape with their faith and ingenuity. They constructed homes and businesses, as well as tabernacles for weekly worship services and temples devoted to their most sacred practices.

via The Columbus Dispatch : Solid & sacred.

We Mormons love our parades, pageants and monumental productions. I know Mormon minimalism must exist out there, but I’ve never seen any. It probably gets painted out by the broad brush strokes of our super-shows.

via MormonTimes

“I’m a creative person trapped in an accountant’s body, not the other way around,” said Dashner, whose third fantasy series will kick off this fall with the nationwide release of “The Maze Runner.”

via MormonTimes

Emerging from a generation engulfed in podcasts and Blu-ray movies, BYU students continue to prioritize time to experience the traditional arts but some wonder what can be done to increase the arts’ appeal.

Each year, BYU provides students and the local community with hundreds of artistic events from traditional folk dances to tragic operas to musical quintets. A question has been raised in today’s society: are students taking advantage of the featured artistic events during their college experience? Many people agree BYU generally has more involvement than most universities, but their viewpoints range about what can be done to ensure future participation.

via Universe.byu.edu.

Audiences are frequently amazed to hear what sounds like the Tabernacle organ accompanying the Mormon Tabernacle Choir during performances on its concert tour, which began June 18 and concludes June 30. The choir is performing Saturday evening in the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Okla. The final performance on the tour will be Monday evening, June 29, at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater.

via LDS Church News

BYU unveiled a Web site Friday aimed at helping Internet users avoid a variety of high-tech dangers. The site — besafe.byu.edu — is available to everyone and offers insight and information on five areas of Internet concern — spam and phishing, viruses and malware, web content, social networking and gaming.

via Deseret News

Phil Schwartz was pleasantly surprised Friday morning when he was able to access the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube on his laptop on the BYU campus.

“We are college students now,” said Schwartz, a Chinese major from Martinez, Calif. “We can judge for ourselves.”

BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said the site was unblocked Friday morning following a recent administration-level review of the policy to block the site on campus.

“Given the educational information and materials available, the university determined to make the service available,” Jenkins said.

YouTube allows users to upload videos of all types for public viewing, as long as the material isn’t defamatory, pornographic or in violation of copyright. Citing concerns with questionable content as well as bandwidth issues, BYU blocked YouTube on campus almost from site’s inception in late 2005.

While many students view YouTube as a classic Internet time-waster, some students and faculty members say the Web site has content that has educational value.

“I remember being in a class in political science and the professor wanted to show some videos of Barack Obama’s campaign,” Schwartz said. “But he couldn’t because they were on YouTube.”

via Deseret News | BYU unblocks on-campus access to YouTube.

The way we use talent today evolved from the parable. Our ancestors took the lesson of the parable and recognized that any special ability a person is given is very much like the amount of money that the master in the parable gave to each of his servants.

via MormonTimes

“It has all the classic signs of people probably doing their very best in a very unsettled and difficult time. Sometimes in those circumstances, on both sides, there’s a misreading of motive. You know, if they had had an opportunity to sit down and talk it through it might have evaporated,” Walker said. “Without a telephone and 1,200 miles between them, it became very hard.”

via MormonTimes

In essence, when it comes to speaking out about what we believe, it is better for Church members “to lean into the stiff wind of opportunity than to simply hunker down and do nothing.”

He asked members to do a few things: listen, know the doctrine, live the standards, be exemplary citizens, be good neighbors, open their mouths, extend invitations and use technology.

via LDS Church News - Viewpoint.

The Utah Festival Opera Company says its 2010 season might be canceled without $655,00 in public aid.

Michael Ballam, the company’s founder, told Cache County officials his nonprofit needed an additional $400,000 in taxpayer money to survive this year, in addition to the $255,000 the county has already spent.

County officials have scoffed at giving $400,000, but are considering doling out an extra $150,000.

via Salt Lake Tribune.

Mormon Channel iPhone Application Now Available | LDS Media Talk.

MANTI, Utah — Every summer for four weeks running, Kaylene Yardley loads her boys, a trunk of costumes and sometimes her husband into the car to make the 324-mile round-trip from Clinton, Utah, to Manti so they can be in the Mormon Miracle Pageant.

via MormonTimes

Audience Alliance was established as an international film enterprise in 2006, as the combination and culmination of the lifetime of filmmaking and media experience of its founders. The first public announcement concerning the company’s bold mission was issued by co-founders Kieth Merrill & Peter Rancie at Park City, Utah (home of Sundance Film Festival). Audience Alliance was founded on the premise that audiences really do know what they want, and they certainly know what they don’t want. Our oft-repeated mantra is “Trust the Audience. Serve the Audience.” Seventy percent of movie-goers in the USA say that Hollywood is out of touch with their values. Audience Alliance has made a clear stand on its values (view VVM) and the way these will be expressed in film. The company is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is represented in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA.

Audience Alliance Motion Picture Studios.

Back when the church was first organized, many pious Christians believed that dancing was wicked. It excited the passions and led men and women to have inappropriate thoughts about each other.

via MormonTimes

Wood was ahead of his time in his love for the past. Long before it even occurred to other people that Mormon history sites would be worth preserving, he was actively, tirelessly and relentlessly pursuing the purchase and preservation of key LDS Church history sites — places where Mormons believe heaven reached down and touched earth through revelation to the prophet Joseph Smith Jr.

via MormonTimes

Don’t attend or participate in any form of entertainment, including concerts, movies, and videocassettes, that is vulgar, immoral, inappropriate, suggestive, or pornographic in any way. Movie ratings not always accurately reflect offensive content. Don’t be afraid to walk out of a movie, turn off a television set, or change a radio station if what’s being presented does not meet your Heavenly Father’s standards. And do not read books or magazines or look at pictures that are pornographic or that present immorality as acceptable.

via Light Planet.

President Thomas S. Monson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated the new Church History Library today after 15 years of planning and four years of construction. He was joined by the First Presidency and members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at today’s event in front of hundreds of community leaders and Church history employees.

via  LDS Newsroom.

“My attitude is we all have to go through trials in life,” she said. “Some of them are small. Some of them are big. I was in a big trial, but I was lucky to have survived it. So I’m taking the good part out of it, I survived and learned tremendous lessons in life — a lesson that regardless of what happens to you, you can make it.”

via MormonTimes

I know Mormon musicians are trying, and I know I should be patient, but you can only listen to the “Remember the Promise” soundtrack so many times before you start to get antsy. Is there nothing out there that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to listen to with my non-Mormon friends?

via MormonTimes

Certainly, the notion of “pop” LDS music is not new (remember “Saturday’s Warrior”?). There have been many who have tried, some even successfully, to combine the current popular sound with the Mormon world view. And I think some are succeeding at it right now. Do we need more? I think we do. Are there enough people like McKay who want to spend their hard-earned money on it? Let’s hope so.

via MormonTimes

From the earliest moments of the Church’s founding, Latter-day Saints have kept a record of their history. The principle behind this practice stems from a scriptural mandate: “There shall be a record kept among you” (D&C 21:1), intended for the “good of the church” and “the rising generations” (D&C 69:8). Maintaining a perspective on the past, while fixing an eye toward the future, is nothing new in religious history. Accounts of God’s intervention in the affairs of mankind have been promulgated by prophets and sages since the beginning of time. These records have provided a framework of meaning that continues to shape human conceptions of morality, identity and progress.

via “A Record Kept”: Constructing Collective Memory - LDS Newsroom.

LDS characters deal with issues including dividing time between work, home and church duties; being a good mother as well as a career woman; and whether killing someone in the line of police duty will affect spiritual or church standing. The show will not be preachy or gospel-oriented, Bay said.

via Standard-Examiner.

Computer hackers disrupted the LDS Church News’s Twitter Web site Sunday night and began to post anti-Mormon messages, which continued for three days before it could be discontinued.

Hackers had changed the password, making it impossible for the Deseret News, which produces the LDS Church News as a separate insert in its paper, to end the ruse.

“The single most frustrating thing was the we couldn’t shut it down,” Deseret News editor Joe Cannon said Friday. “We lost control of the password on our own site with no notification from Twitter.”

Cannon said the episode was “disconcerting and a nuisance, but we did take limited comfort in the fact that apparently this happens a lot with Twitter.”

In fact, it was those other cases that helped Tim Conde, attorney for the Deseret News , to get through to the Twitter administrators.

via Salt Lake Tribune.

The Church History Department’s previous accommodations were designed to be more of an internal archive, said Steve Olsen, managing director over Church history. “The Church in its foundational documents has a huge commitment to preserving history and to making history useful for members and others interested in learning about its history,” said Olsen. “It is the first time in the Church’s 179-year history that we have had a dedicated public building for this purpose. … It’s really quite significant.”

via LDS Newsroom.

Controversial Fox Host Talks About Kicking Bottle, Turning Mormon and Common Sense

via ABC News.

Following the release of a new video channel by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, BYU is reconsidering the school’s ban on YouTube.

“There is a review taking place because the amount of educational information and material on YouTube is increasing,” said university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins. “This certainly includes material coming from the Church.”

The Church’s “Mormon Channel” on the LDS.org home page offers photos, audio feeds and videos — including a link to the official church YouTube channel “Mormon Message.”

via BYU NewsNet

In his remarks, President Uchtdorf testified of Jesus Christ as the master healer and presented Mr. Sytnyk with a replica of the “Christus” statue to place in the clinic as a reminder of the Savior’s healing power. A fixed plaque was unveiled near the entrance of the building noting the exceptional contribution of the church to the establishment of the diagnostic center.

via MormonTimes

When asked about his own plans for serving an LDS mission, Archuleta, who doesn’t turn 19 until December, said he feels as if he’s already on one.

“There is so much that I want to give back to the One who has blessed me with this gift,” he said about his singing abilities. “I feel that there must be a reason why I’m here, doing what I’m doing. And I want to make sure that I do what is expected of me before it all ends.

via Deseret News