I don’t need anyone to tell me whether The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a Christian church. I’ve lived it for 48 years. We worship Christ. We follow Christ. We study Christ. We fall short and ask for his grace. The Book of Mormon testifies of Him on every page.

President Dallin H. Oaks has given many memorable talks over his 40 year ministry. One the most memorable for me is his talk, “Good, Better, Best” which seems more applicable today than ever before. “We have to forego some good things in order to choose others that are better or best because they develop faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and strengthen our families.”

True faith is focused in and on the Lord Jesus Christ and is a principle of action, trust, and power. As we act in accordance with the truths of the Savior’s gospel and trust in His promises, we are blessed with the spiritual capacity to “rise up” and press forward through the challenges of mortality while experiencing the joys His gospel makes possible in our lives.

Peak Jeffery R Holland quote: "'The welfare of America is closely bound up with the welfare of all mankind.' So it has been and so it yet will be. And so it is—but in ways which only those who embrace the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ can fully understand or appreciate."

Ward drama stinks. You know what makes it worse? Passing it down to your kids. I've watched bitter parents openly bash other ward members in front of their teenagers. The inevitable result? Bitter kids. Kids who check out and refuse to participate. Kids who constantly judge the very leaders and youth trying to support them. If we want our kids to love the gospel, we have to stop poisoning the well at home.

One of the greatest musical collabs of all time. This is Alfie Boe, legendary Les Misérables actor, singing "Bring Him Home," accompanied by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Goosebumps every time. Get your headphones for this one:

If you asked me to name one talk that forever changed how I view myself and the world since— it would be this one. “Beware of Pride” by President Ezra Taft Benson (read by President Gordon B. Hinckley here) This talk is the gift that keeps on giving for me. It includes 108 unique scripture references to support its teachings. That’s right— 108. It is the playbook on how to fulfill one’s divine destiny. It called me unto repentance the first time I read it and comes to my mind every time I suspect pride is preventing me from being my best self. “Pride is the great stumbling block to Zion. I repeat: Pride is the great stumbling block to Zion.” Enjoy this talk that profoundly impacts me and millions.

Enduring to the end is linked inextricably to the spiritual gift of charity. Enduring to the end is not merely a relentless determination to grit our teeth, hold on to the limits of our physical strength and mental capacity, and push through the challenges and adversities of mortal life; it is so much more than that. Enduring to the end is the joyous quest of a lifetime—a pressing forward with faith in Jesus Christ in a gradual process of trusting in and receiving help from our Savior to become more like Him. As our love for Him grows ever stronger and deeper, we can be blessed to receive spiritual perspective, the Lord’s empowering grace, and exceedingly great and indescribable joy.

I was 10 years old the first time I saw this painting. Something stopped me. I sat and stared at it for a few minutes. Just a little kid feeling a sadness and gratitude I don’t know I had felt before.

Just last night, a Ugandan refugee family welcomed me to dinner in NY. Their dad was murdered. They joined the Church after resettling. 7-yr-old Joshua prayed — it was angelic. His mom Jane said to us: “We are a different color, but the same blood.”

lam Tongi performs 'Monsters' on American Idol 2023, a heartfelt tribute that brings all three judges to tears.💔

Today, all are invited to come and see the exhibits, statues and experiences featured in the new Temple Square Visitors’ Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The opening of the visitors’ center marks a significant step in the reopening of Temple Square in anticipation of the Salt Lake Temple Celebration, scheduled for April 5, 2027, through October 1, 2027. The visitors’ center is open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. with no reservations or tickets required. Guest experiences are offered in English, French, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish. Experiences in American Sign Language (ASL) will be available soon. The only experience requiring a reservation is the “Inside a Temple” tour, a guided 30-minute experience on the lower level of the center. Learn more on Church Newsroom. newsroom.churchofjesuschrist…

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

People who are genuinely kind are not weak. They just learned somewhere along the way that cruelty is easy, bitterness is lazy, and softness takes real strength.

Important read👇

The kids wanted to prank their dad, and he did exactly what they wished for.

I had the privilege of going with my oldest daughter to the Provo City Temple yesterday, where she received her endowment. There is a point in the endowment where Eve is named as the “Mother of all living.” She is the pinnacle and final creation of God the Father and Jesus Christ, The creators of life, and the heart of the human family. To all of the Daughters of Eve, Happy Mother’s Day.

“No love in mortality comes closer to approximating the pure love of Jesus Christ than the selfless love a devoted mother has for her child.” - Jeffrey R. Holland

“There is one thing we can do to make life sweeter, more joyful, even glorious. We can be grateful!” - Dieter Uchtdorf #SundayThought

The Book of Mormon—Keystone of Our Religion | President Ezra Taft Benson "If the Book of Mormon be true—and millions have now testified that they have the witness of the Spirit that it is indeed true—then one must accept the claims of the Restoration and all that accompanies it."