Fortifying the Mountain of the Lord
I had the opportunity yesterday morning of joining with a group at the headquarters of the Temple Square renovation project in Salt Lake City. We were given a presentation about the effort by one of its leaders and, afterwards, we walked over to the site itself.
Here are links to three items that have recently been posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
Conference Talks: “The Day of Atonement, the Mosaic Temple, and the Christian Sacrament of Communion: Links and Symbols”
This presentation was given by Shon D. Hopkin at the Interpreter Foundation’s 2014 Temple on Mount Zion Conference, on Saturday, 25 October 2014.
In the 9 April 2023 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Radio Show, Terry Hutchinson and John Gee and Kevin Christensen discussed New Testament lesson 19, “Rejoice with Me; for I Have Found My Sheep Which Was Lost,” covering Luke 12–17 and John 11.
The other segments of the 9 April 2023 radio show can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-april-9-2023. You will be delighted to know that the Interpreter Radio Show can be heard live on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. You can also listen to it live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.
Come, Follow Me — New Testament Study and Teaching Helps: Lesson 19, May 1 — 7: Luke 12–17; John 11—“Rejoice with Me; for I Have Found My Sheep Which Was Lost”
Once again, as he regularly does, Jonn Claybaugh provides a set of concise notes for Interpreter readers who are students and teachers of the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
From another front: On Tuesday, my wife and I had our first script meeting with our core group of filmmakers for the Six Days in August project. It’s exciting to see things beginning to get underway. I still have a fairly steep fundraising hill to climb, though. And I hate asking people for money.
I had the opportunity yesterday morning of joining with a group at the headquarters of the Temple Square renovation project in Salt Lake City. We were given a presentation about the effort by one of its leaders and, afterwards, we walked over to the site itself. It’s a huge, complex, and ambitious undertaking. Very impressive. In fact, I didn’t know how big it is; I don’t think I remembered that even the Joseph Smith Memorial Building is also wholly or partially shut down. But I can’t wait until it’s finished. We’ve been without the Salt Lake Temple for too long already.
This has special personal meaning for us. We were married in the Salt Lake Temple. Even back then, when there were far fewer temples than there are now, I had other favorites that I, at least, personally considered — Oakland and Manti and Cardston, for instance — but none of our families lived near them and, excepting Cardston, none of them had any particular connection to our families. Los Angeles was a possibility, but, given that our families were centered in the Denver and Los Angeles and Salt Lake City areas, the Salt Lake Temple was centrally located. And, given its history and its iconic importance, the decision turned out to be really easy for us. My wife’s grandparents could be there, for one thing. The drawback was that the Salt Lake Temple is a very busy wedding venue in the summer, and that we didn’t know the temple officiator who performed our sealing. (I’ve sometimes envied people who had a father or uncle or grandfather or even a family-friend member of the Twelve officiate at their marriage.). But then, we didn’t have any such connections anywhere.
I’m impressed by President Russell M. Nelson’s willingness to launch this project, knowing, at his age — he is currently in his ninety-ninth year — that it’s very possible that he will never again in this life be able to enter a dedicated Salt Lake Temple for meetings of the Brethren or for his own personal temple service and temple worship. I hope, though, that he will. He’s in remarkably good health. But the anticipated completion date for the Salt Lake Temple’s renovation is now 2026. And, if you’re already ninety-eight years old, that’s a very long way off.
Today, as a theme for what I’m sharing from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, I’ve chosen to focus on a trio of horrific ways in which following the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints blights human lives and damages society:
“Pornography use at any level harms romantic relationships, says new BYU study”
But I don’t want to neglect these three atrocities, which were found in the vicinityof the Hitchens File. They clearly illustrate the nature of the theocratic hellscape that is Utah — where (coincidence?) the Church has its headquarters:
