Coming up on 5 November 2022
In anticipation of the 2022 Temple on Mount Zion Conference on Saturday, 5 November 2022, we begin a new series of articles: Conference Talks.
In the first portion of this episode of the fabled Interpreter Radio Show, Neal Rappleye and Jasmin Rappleye and Hales Swift, joined by their guest Stephen O. Smoot, recap the 2022 FAIR conference., which was originally broadcast on 7 August 2022. (It has now been edited, meaning that all commercial and other extraneous interruptions have been meticulously removed from it, and archived, made accessible to you at your convenience and at no charge.) By contrast, the second portion of the show features a roundtable in which Brother and Sister Rappleye, Brother Swift, and Brother Smoot discuss the upcoming Come, Follow Me lesson #38 (Isaiah 13–14; 24–30; 35). Moreover, as they sometimes say from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum (“I announce to you a great joy!”): The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard each and every Sunday evening from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. As an alternative, though, especially if you’re not located along the Wasatch Front in Utah, you can listen to the festivities live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” we chortle in our joy.
The Sixth Interpreter Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference
Saturday, November 5, 2022
Sponsored by
The Interpreter Foundation
Conference Talks: “The Crown of Creation” (by David R. Seely and Jo Ann H. Seely)
In anticipation of the 2022 Temple on Mount Zion Conference on Saturday, 5 November 2022 — see https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2022-temple-on-mount-zion-conference/ for more information — we begin a new series of articles: Conference Talks. Each week, we will feature one talk, starting with the first Temple on Mount Zion Conference, held
Creation as Model for Adam and Eve as Co-Creators. The creation stories in the scriptures contain many links with temple theology and ritual. Within these links we explore how these narratives describe God as creator, and the essential elements of how he creates. In particular we explore how God created Adam and Eve and gave them the responsibility of both caring for his creation as well as becoming, primarily through procreation, co-creators with God by following the model that he gave them as creator.
You can listen to an audio recording of this talk at the link given above.
Still on the subject of the temple: Truman Madsen, who died in 2009 and whom I greatly miss, changed the direction of my life at a crucial stage when I was a high school student in California. I probably would not have attended Brigham Young University absent a particular encounter with him. Eventually, he became a faculty colleague, and then a friend. In a month or two, barring unforeseen developments, I’ll be back in Jerusalem again — where, among other things, I taught for nearly six months on the faculty of BYU’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies during a period when Truman was serving there as the Center’s director.
Here are two passages from a devotional address titled “Foundations of Temple Worship” that Truman Madsen delivered at the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University in October 2004:
President McKay asked for a million dollars from the local saints, and had pledge cards before the meeting was over for that amount, plus. Then he spoke about the temple. I’ll spare you the details except for the core statement that I have cherished, and which bent, as it were, the twig in me, which has grown and grown ever since.
He said, “Brothers and sisters, I believe there are few, even temple workers, who comprehend the full meaning and power of the temple endowment. Seen for what it is, it is the step-by-step ascent into the eternal presence. If our young people could only glimpse it, it would be the most powerful spiritual motivation of their lives.” I resolved that day, because of what happened in my heart, always to raise my voice in testifying of the temple and never of criticizing it, to carry out as best I could my dream of finding a queen who would share in me the total conviction that the temple is ours, made for us and prepared for us, and that out of that could come a family who would love the Lord Jesus Christ as nothing else in the universe.
The fulness of truth, and the fulness of the Holy Ghost, and the fulness of the priesthood, and the fulness of the glory of the Father are all phrases that are ocurrent in connection with the temple, and cannot be received anywhere else, nowhere else on the planet. You cannot receive the fulness that the Lord has for you without coming through the temple and having the temple come through you.
***
This incident (or, perhaps, this non-incident) continues to reverberate:
And, on a separate but somewhat comparable issue:
“Sandy police now linking 12 churches in vandalism investigation”
Compare this article, which appeared yesterday:
“Orem Utah Temple fire declared as arson”
***
Somehow, this little article seems especially relevant this summer:
***
Finally, here are a few horrors that I found recently while looking through the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File©:
