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Mormon temples
Most of my readers know that I’m LDS; Mormon. We build temples. One of the most important reasons for temples is to tie together families from our oldest ancestors to those who are to come in the future. They are there to make the human family whole. Where I live we have had two temples…
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Words, music, sunday thoughts.
One of the constants in our lives is words. We constantly use words to express ourselves, to glimpse the souls of others, and words stream through our private thoughts during all our waking hours and even many sleeping ones. Words are in many ways the skeleton of our conscious selves. A person who has grown…
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Integrity
I gave a talk at church today. It isn’t formatted very well into an essay, but below is the text of it more or less: Integrity is one of those basic principles which is so simple, and yet means so much. It is a deep eternal aspect of the way things are. We often refer…
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Fundamental creation
Michael Heller will be awarded the Templeton prize, which is given for “progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities”, for his life’s work pursuing the ultimate cause. Reading his statement at the announcement of the prize, I find a kindred spirit: “…I am interested in too many things. Amongst my numerous fascinations, two have most…
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What is good religion?
It’s always fun to meet people on the web, and someone I’ve met through his kind enthusiasm for my work is Rich. I recently checked his blog, and he has a posted a great chapter in the book he is co-authoring with is father, on what good religion is. Being of the same religion, we of course…
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Is Reiki religion or science?
The claim has been made that Reiki is not a religion, but is evidence based medicine. So I decided to compare it to both religion and medicine to see where it fit best. I think I’m a pretty good choice to do the comparison since I am both religious and scientifically minded. I hope this…
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The mind/body connection
There has been an interesting discussion about complementary and alternative medicine between bloggers Lynn and #1 Dinosaur. One thing I’d like to point out in this discussion is why the mind/body connection is not alternative medicine. By alternative medicine, I mean therapies that patients pursue that have little to no scientific backing. It is not because doctors or…
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President Hinckley passes on
My sister just emailed me. I hadn’t watched the news in the last two hours, and so I ‘missed’ the report of the death of the prophet. I don’t think we could classify this event as sad. It is simply a time of change. As David G. from the Juvenile Instructor said, “The prophet is dead. Long live the prophet.” …
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The ultimate centrism
If you’ve ever watched the movie Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan which is itself a great read, you might remember the last phrase, something that Ellie had said before in the movie. “I’ll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It’s bigger than anything…
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Repentance
I’ve always thought it somewhat unfair that we “learn from our mistakes”. Mistakes being the euphemism for sins, for doing something wrong, immoral, inethical. We do something wrong, and gain from it. I realized in communicating with a friend that this isn’t quite true, and then the concept made a bit more sense. Anyone can ‘make a mistake’.…