I have enjoyed my almost thirty years of membership in the Church and have never regretted a second of it. My life has been influenced both temporally and spiritually for good by the teachings of the Church. I bless the day I met the missionaries. …[more]
On a cold February day in 1964, when I was 14 years old, two LDS missionaries knocked on the door of our home in western Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Pittsburgh. Because of the bitter cold, my mother felt sorry for them and invited them into the house. …[more]
I have been blessed to have seen the hand of the Lord in my life, sometimes in very startling ways. Time and time again I witnessed the hand of the Lord as He blessed the lives of pageant participants, often for reasons that remain private and personal to them. …[more]
How is it that I, trained in the academic profession at one of the finest graduate schools in the country, turned out to be a believer rather than a nonbeliever? Among some academicians there is the notion that scholars are supposed to be religious skeptics, even cynics. …[more]
I have come to know through the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Christ and that He is the Savior and Redeemer of mankind. I know that I along with all mankind will be lifted up to stand before Him to be judged of our works because He was lifted up by men upon the cross. …[more]
One of my goals is to study things carefully and find the truth. Many times what is perceived as true is influenced more by popular opinion rather than by factual information. …[more]
Isn’t it remarkable how elegant the laws governing the universe are? And isn’t it particularly remarkable that we humans can comprehend these laws? Why does the fact that we have been able to discover these laws detract from our sense of wonder? …[more]
Except for my father, the Prophet Joseph was the first man I ever loved. As a boy, even before I knew Joseph Smith’s history, I thrilled when I heard his name. As a teenager, I read everything I could find about him. As an adult, I have published two books about him. …[more]
I got tired of just saying “I don’t know” all the time, and so my desire to study and learn more about the Gospel became overpowering. In addition to studying the scriptures themselves, I discovered religious scholarship, and began to plow into it. …[more]
I was raised Jewish and, as such, participated in the religious traditions of Judaism. I attended Hebrew school, read the Old Testament, and took part in the holy days of the Jewish calendar. …[more]
I suppose I am qualified to say I know that God lives. I don’t know it in the way I know who my children are or the way I know the difference between an apple and a potato. It is more like the way I know that kindness is better than roughness. …[more]
With the kind permission of his widow, JoAn Bitton, we include, posthumously, something of the testimony of Professor Davis Bitton, an eminent Latter-day Saint historian and a dear friend to many. …[more]
I don’t think that the universe with its billions of galaxies, trillions of stars and planets, and a huge assortment of other objects and phenomena, together with the laws that govern their precise movements, came about by accident. …[more]
Just as our eyes and ears can be saturated in physical sights and sounds, so our souls can be immersed in the pure intelligence of the Spirit. The first, for the most part, teach us of the things of the world; the second, the things of eternity. …[more]
The relationship between scripture and personal experience operates in both forward and backward directions: not only do the stories of scripture guide daily life but, in addition, what we have lived conditions our understanding of scriptural accounts. …[more]
I grew up outside of the Church, in a small town in South Texas. My father was a professor at the local university. Though I was baptized at age eight, there were no Latter-day Saints in that area, so I attended the Methodist Church until my parents divorced. …[more]
Since the days of the prophet Joseph Smith, the LDS Church has consistently held to its position that the world is filled with truth, although there is also clearly much that is not true. The responsibility of the Latter-day Saint is to “receive truth, let it come from whence it may.” …[more]
I have found the teachings of the Church to be profoundly deep, and on many levels of spiritual and intellectual thought. The great minds of the Church have opened my mind and raised me to a greater level of understanding and belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. …[more]
I learned from the time I was a very small child to view human experience as richly meaningful and therefore sacred. I learned to place great faith in the revelatory power of words—both the words of scripture and words carefully rendered from human experience. …[more]
As I reflect on my witness of the gospel and church of Jesus Christ, I find it anchored in one of several spiritual gifts spoken of in the Book of Mormon, that of “an exceedingly great faith.” …[more]
