More than 200 years ago on Sept. 21-22, the angel Moroni visited and taught Joseph Smith and showed him the location of the gold plates containing the Book of Mormon. Here are Church News articles, podcast episode and videos about the event.

I reread this every year. I cry like a baby every year. Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero. Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked. Lisa: I understand. Can they see you? Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake. Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor. Lisa: Are you okay? Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again. Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true? Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan. Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call. Lisa: I promise. Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy. Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.) Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol. Todd: I understand. I’ll be back. Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot. Lisa: What are you going to do? Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out. Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.

The First Vision, Joseph Smith, and Pragmatism There is a way of looking at the First Vision that makes it much larger than the question we normally ask of it. Usually, we ask whether it happened. Did Joseph Smith really enter the grove? Did he really see the Father and the Son? Were there truly two divine Personages standing before him? Those questions matter. But I have begun to wonder whether there is another deeper question that comes afterward. What kind of world comes into view if Joseph Smith was telling the truth? Pragmatism does not require us to reduce truth to whatever happens to be convenient. It asks us to take ideas seriously enough to follow them into life. By their fruits ye shall know them. A doctrine is not merely a sentence written in a handbook. It enters the mind. It teaches human beings what they are. It shapes marriages, children, communities, institutions, and civilizations. Ideas become worlds. And so one way of approaching the Restoration is to ask what kind of world its revelations create. When I do that, I keep returning to the First Vision. Joseph Smith could not have known the philosophical battles that would surround human embodiment two centuries later. He could not have foreseen the degree to which Western civilization would struggle over whether sex and gender are grounded in something prior to personal self-definition. But revelation does not have to be given merely for the generation that first receives it. Words spoken in one century suddenly become luminous in another. Warnings that appear almost excessive to the people who first hear them become prophetic when civilizations later repeat the same pattern. The Book of Mormon is filled with this phenomenon. Its pride cycles are not simply descriptions of vanished peoples. They are warnings written through one civilization for another civilization that has not yet been born. Revelation travels through time. And perhaps the First Vision does too. The First Vision works the way starlight works. The light you see tonight left its star long before you were born. It crossed all that dark without changing, and it arrives at the exact moment you look up. The grove is like that. Its light is still arriving. Some of it landed on a boy. Some of it landed on a document in 1995. Some of it is landing now, on a civilization that has become uncertain whether bodies mean anything. A present civilization that treats identity as something you make. A civilization that cannot explain why men and women need one another. A civilization in which marriage is fragile, children are optional, communities are thin, and loneliness is ordinary. There is a Father. He is real. You are not an accident. Your body is not meaningless. Your nature is not infinitely plastic. Your relationships matter. Your family matters. Generations matter. Covenants matter. What you do with your body matters. What you build with another human being matters. The children who come after you matter. The dead who came before you matter. You exist inside a story much larger than the autonomous self. God revealed Himself in embodied form to a boy in nineteenth century America partly because twenty first century humanity would eventually forget that the body means something. The grove begins to look less like an isolated miracle and more like the first stone in an entire theological architecture. From the embodied Father follows the dignity of embodiment. From the dignity of embodiment follows the possibility that our created nature is meaningful. From the meaningfulness of our created nature follows the significance of sexual difference. From sexual difference follows the possibility that fatherhood and motherhood are not merely arbitrary social arrangements. And from there the Restoration's extraordinary emphasis on marriage, family, generations, sealing, ancestry, and posterity begins to appear not as a collection of unrelated doctrines but as a single vision of reality. It is also a different account of what a human being is. Freedom does not consist in inventing yourself. It consists in discovering what you already are. Creation comes before choice. Gift comes before autonomy. Reality comes before desire. This is why I increasingly think the doctrine of the eternal family is downstream from the First Vision. The Family Proclamation did not appear from nowhere. Its underlying metaphysics were already standing in the grove. If there is a Father in Heaven, fatherhood is not merely a cultural invention. If divine life is personal and relational, relationship itself belongs somewhere near the center of reality. If embodiment possesses eternal significance, then the differences embodied within humanity may possess significance as well. And if human beings belong to one another across generations, then salvation cannot ultimately be conceived only as the rescue of isolated individuals. Suddenly temples make sense. Sealing makes sense. Genealogy makes sense. Covenant makes sense. The whole Restoration ethos of linking husbands to wives, parents to children, children to ancestors, and generations to generations begins to look like the practical consequence of a universe in which relationship is more fundamental than radical autonomy. A universe that is, at the bottom of it, a family. And this is what I find beautiful about it. Beauty has always been my first guide to truth, because the divine is beauty. Beauty is not the decoration on truth. It is truth showing its face. The beauty descends into ordinary life. It produces kitchens and dinner tables. It produces fathers blessing children. It produces mothers carrying babies into sacrament meeting. It produces teenagers sitting beside grandparents. It produces missionaries leaving home and families waiting for them to come back. It produces temples filled with the names of the dead. It produces a peculiar people who spend enormous amounts of their lives worrying about men and women who died centuries before they were born. It is a doctrine turning into a world that you can touch and feel. An idea that becomes a world like that has stopped being only an idea. It is truth.

lets reset our algorithm and listen to an apostle of God it is my testimony that Clark Gilbert is an apostle thank you and good night

Here is what I dream. I dream that the generational estrangement of my family can be healed in the temple. Not talked about. Not forgiven in some vague way that costs nothing. Healed. I dream of kneeling at that altar with the names no one alive can explain, my grandparents and their silence, the aunt, the cousin who carried the damage in his body, the faces in North Carolina I was never allowed to know, and that through those ordinances, through that strange mysticism of water and oil and a whispered name, something would move that no court and no apology and no deathbed ever could. Some nights I hate the ones who cut the cord. I hate them for the thin table, for the half empty circle around my son, for the suspicion I still carry the darkness of estrangement is in me too. And I love them, every one, in the same breath, and I have stopped trying to make those two things agree. So what I am asking for is not my love. My love is too small, it arrives too late, and it is soaked in anger. I am asking for the divine act of eternal love itself, the love that built the stars, to reach back through the veil to the ones who cut the cord and the ones who were cut by it, and gather them into the chain again, link by link, whether or not any of them ever managed it here. And when I say the chain I no longer mean only mine. This is what Joseph Smith was reaching for at the end of his life. He was not building a heaven of private rooms where a man goes in alone and shuts the door behind him. He was reaching for the whole human family, welded into one chain from the first parents to the last child, every generation joined to the one before it and the one after, because he had come to believe that the dead cannot be made perfect without us and we cannot be made perfect without our dead, and that a heaven of strangers is no heaven at all. He called seeking after our dead the greatest responsibility God had laid on us, and he meant it so literally that he set a font on the backs of twelve oxen to do it. The Family Proclamation says the same thing in quieter words. It says family relationships were meant to be perpetuated beyond the grave, that the ordinances of the temple exist so families can be bound forever, that this is the eternal destiny God intends for His children. When I was a young man, I saw a greeting card it as a nice greeting card. Now I am a man with scars that sees a promise that the branch that went dark in North Carolina hangs on the very same chain as the children asleep down the hall from me, and that no link on it is finally lost. I cannot prove any of this. But it is absolute beauty. Maybe that is evidence of truth. Because a belief like that does not sit still. It goes to work in the living. It sends a man to the funeral he was going to skip, makes him answer the letter he was going to let die, puts him in the car toward the cousin’s children he has been avoiding for years. It spreads outward as one continuous act of beauty, breaking down walls that were built before I was born, pulling the old suspicion out of the blood, until the pain of alienation and separation and estrangement finally runs out of generations to fall on. Not a family patched. The human family gathered, and mine one short length of the cord.

it is time

LDS Testimony from someone who does not consider themselves LDS For close to twenty years I had not gone to church. Not, at least, to any church or any place with the intention of fully committing to it. I had thought about God for most of those years. I had read and argued and wondered. What I had not done was commit. I was working from home the day my dad walked into the room and told me that Charlie Kirk had been killed. My son was one year old. The first thing I felt was disbelief. The second, close behind it, was sorrow. Not the sorrow of politics. I did not agree with Charlie Kirk on every ideological point, and that was never the source of it. It was an overwhelming sadness about the kind of world my son was inheriting. A young father had been murdered in public for holding opinions that some people did not share. My son was one. His world had just shown him what it does to young fathers, and he was too small to know it, and I was not. Then it got worse. In Los Angeles, people were rejoicing. Some of my coworkers were glad. Most were indifferent. Between the gladness and the shrug I went into something I can only call existential shock. Whatever you thought of the man, a husband and a father had been killed for speaking, and the people around me were either pleased or unbothered. Hatred at least still cares about what it hates. Indifference to a public murder has stopped caring about anything at all. That was the day the word darkness stopped being a metaphor for me. It is easy to say the world is dark. We say it flippantly and poetically, the way we say the sky is gray. I mean something more literal than that. I came to believe, and I still believe, that there is a spiritual war being waged over this world. Darkness is not only the absence of light. It is a thing with an appetite, and it takes many forms. Political violence is one of its forms. So is the crowd that cheers it. So is the shrug. I was in a headspin. I was processing all of this and very emotional, and so I did what a person does when the floor gives way. I went looking for the sacred. I went to three churches. I went back to Mass first, because that is where I came from. No one mentioned what had happened. No one spoke of anything that was going on in the world. There was a guitar. It might as well have been an evangelical service, and for a Mass that is a strange thing to be able to say. I did not feel anything of the Spirit there. So I went to an evangelical service, and once again nothing of substance was given. Nothing reached down to where I actually was. I do not say this to condemn either congregation. I say it because it is part of the story. I had come in from a world that had just shown me its face, and I found churches that seemed to be looking at the same screens as everyone else, flattened the same way, offering the same comforts on the same terms. A church that has learned to sound like the culture has very little to say on the day the culture reveals what it is. I had come looking for something that stood outside the world and could speak to it. I did not find it in the first two places I looked. Then I went to the Latter Day Saint ward in Manhattan Beach. In that tradition the blessing of the sacrament bread is entrusted to young men, often still in their teens, and the prayer they say is fixed. The words must be spoken exactly. If a word is missed, the prayer is said again from the beginning. On that morning the young priest at the table was a boy with a cognitive disability and a severe speech impediment. He stood over the bread and he struggled to get the words out. He labored through that prayer syllable by syllable, and the whole room waited on him, and nobody hurried him. I sat there and tears came down my face. I had tears because it was so beautiful. I want to try to say what happened, because it matters for everything that follows. When you feel that the world is filled with darkness, and then in a single moment the world becomes a far more beautiful place than you had thought it could be, something has entered the room. I felt light coming into that room. Not a mood. Not a sentiment. An arrival. The people who came before us, in every age and every culture, would have known what to call it. The holy is not something you reason your way toward. It is something that comes upon you. It undoes you and it draws you, both at once. You tremble and you cannot look away. I was doing both. Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ. We believe that in the bread Christ is made manifest, truly and substantially, not as a symbol but as himself. I know that many Latter Day Saints do not share that belief, and that is okay. I am not going to pretend the two traditions say the same thing about what happens on that table. But I will tell you what I saw. That boy, with every ounce of his being, and I mean being in its fullest sense, the whole of what he was, was showing reverence and prayer to his Lord. He was blessing the bread so that the people could partake of the bread of Jesus Christ. And in that act, real presence was being made manifest. I believe that to be true. But it was not only that. What broke me open was who the boy was, and where he was standing. Outside that room, in the secular world, he is the kind of person a great many people dismiss. Maybe he gets bullied at school. Maybe he is talked over, or talked around, or treated as an obstacle to the schedule. Every other institution I know of would have found him something else to do, something out of the way. And here he was the center of the room. Every eye was on him. He had been given the most important words that would be spoken that morning, and he had been given the time to speak them. He held an elevated status, and everyone present was content to wait on him. I stopped and thought about how beautiful that was, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. Here was a disabled child, and he was the one blessing the bread. It was one of the most beautiful things I had seen in a church in decades. And I could not help holding the two images side by side. The world had just silenced a fluent man in the middle of a sentence, and a crowd had cheered. The kingdom had just handed its holiest words to a boy who could hardly form them, and a room full of people had bowed their heads and waited. That is the difference between the two kingdoms. That is the whole difference. All of this leads me to the point I actually want to make. When it comes to arriving, or arriving again, at religious truth, we make a catastrophic error. It is the characteristic error of secular thought and of the postmodern mind, and most of us absorbed it without ever choosing it. We assume that everything must be treated like the scientific method. We assume that faith is a kind of equation, that you prove it the way you prove a theorem, by reason and logic and evidence lined up in the correct order, and that if you cannot do that you are not entitled to believe. Nothing in the human story supports the assumption. For as long as there have been human beings, since we came down out of the trees, religious truth has not been arrived at by proof. It has been arrived at by encounter. Our ancestors buried their dead and carved ornaments tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote a word. They met the sacred before they argued about it. They stood in front of something and knew they were being addressed. That is where religion begins, in every people and in every age, and it is still where it begins. The modern person has been trained to be immune to being addressed, to stand behind a pane of glass and evaluate. But the glass is the anomaly. The encounter is the norm. Truth, in the religious sense, is an encounter with the sacred. It always has been and it always will be. Truth happens at the LDS Church on Sundays. This I know.

how I view the truth & the Book of Mormon In all of human history, from any anthropological standpoint you care to take, no people ever came to the truth of their religion by rational empiricism. The idea would have been unintelligible to them. Truth was found in ritual. It was found in story, in the sacred meal and the sacred place, in the burning bush and the still small voice. Truth is the encounter with the sacred. It is not something you get by reading a nice book by philosophy and concluding, after due reflection, that it contains a nice idea. We have fallen into the habit of treating religious truth as though it belonged in the same category as scientific truth. It never did. It was never meant to. Religious truth is the truth of a sunset. It is the truth of looking into your baby's eyes for the first time. It is the truth of a toddler grabbing your hand and dragging you across the room to show you his toy. It is the truth of looking at the love of your life across an altar and knowing you are sealed for eternity. It is sitting next to the new widow at church on the first Sunday she comes alone. That is truth. That is the truth of Scripture. That is the truth Jesus speaks of when He says He is the way, the truth, and the life. He does not say He is a correct proposition. He says He is a Person you can come to. Nowhere is all of this clearer than in the Book of Mormon, and nowhere is the category mistake more common. We spend enormous energy arguing about the book in the descriptive register. Geography. Metallurgy. Genetics. What the archaeologists have and have not found. Critics attack on that ground and defenders rush to hold it. Much of that work is honest and some of it is valuable. But the book itself never proposed to be known that way, and it says so on nearly every page. Ultimately, the Book of Mormon is an invitation. Come unto Christ, and be perfected in Him. Everything else is commentary.

It’s my first day teaching Appellate Brief Writing at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School. Here goes nothing!

This is the beauty I want my children to grow up inside. God is not an occasional visitor. He is a continual presence, and the name of that continual presence is covenant. He does not merely love, the way weather merely happens. He promises. A covenant is love that has signed its name. God introduces himself by the promises he has kept: the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. He names himself by generations. 'I will be their God, and they shall be my people. I will not leave you comfortless.' And every single week he sets a table with bread and water, small and repeatable on purpose, so that his presence is renewed by sacrifice and no one has to live on the memory of one mountaintop. In the LDS faith, a child born to parents who have been sealed in the temple is said to be born in the covenant. I have loved that phrase for years. Mormon children do not arrive into a neutral universe and wait to be claimed. They are born already belonging. The covenant is in the room before they were. The same God who kept faith with Sarah's laughter and Hannah's tears, who kept faith in a wagon bed in the snow and on the high plains beside a handcart, keeps faith today in a bright room LDS parents will never forget, and he will keep it with their children long after they're gone. That is their inheritance. Not my name. His promise.

True

What did Joseph Smith actually teach? The bonds we forge here can be made permanent by the authority that binds in heaven what is bound on earth, so that a marriage sealed in the temple is not dissolved by death but only deepened by it, and a family remains a family when the stars have burned down to ash. Joseph said the love you build in the small unremarkable hours of an ordinary life is not a comfort for a few decades but the literal architecture of the world to come. Love is the seed of thrones, the beginning of a family that will go on creating and rejoicing and ascending together, world without end.

Yes Gene!!! one my favorite verses in the BoM. xitter.cf/nicoraytruth/status/20…

The Fair Treatment of Religious Organizations Act just passed committee. This legislation would prevent federal agencies from stripping funding from organizations with traditional views on marriage, sexual conduct standards, or gender identity policies. Thank you @RepBlakeMoore for all your hard work on this critical legislation.

I think that's one of the reasons they increased accessibility to the temples. Maybe going often helps. Does it?

Call it secularism. Call it modernity. Call it progress. Scripture has an older name for it: the World. And the gospel is blunt about what the World is. Darkness. It has always hated the family. But it will not say so out loud. The World does not shout. It whispers, and the whisper sounds so reasonable: "Establish your career first." "Divorce just happens." "You are too talented to stay home with your kids." "Take the meeting. There will be other soccer games." "Never have more children than you can afford." Smooth. Sensible. Modern. And every word of it a lie from the father of lies. Here is what the whisper never tells you. Children carry the beauty that built the heavens. Every year you wait is beauty you were made to hold, slipping through your hands. I stopped listening. And I have never had so much joy. So much peace. So much fulfillment. No promotion, no paycheck, no purchase has ever come close. So hear what the World will never say. Marry early. Have children young. Have more than you think you can afford. Then look at what you are watching. A mother. A child. This is the treasure they told you to postpone. This is the wealth they said you could not afford.