What follows is a Sacrament Meeting talk given 9 February 2025, by long-time Keepa’ninny Kevin Folkman. Certainly few topics could be more timely.

In May of 1844 Joseph Smith gave a funeral sermon for King Follett, a man who was working on the construction of the Nauvoo temple. While the actual transcripts of his sermon vary in some details, several very important truths were recorded by separate scribes. One of the most important statements he made was that the world we now live in was not created from nothing but was organized from existing materials by our Father in Heaven and Christ. Further, he also indicated that all of us, God’s children here in mortality, were organized from pre-existent and eternal intelligences into spirit bodies to populate and progress through this mortal existence and become exalted beings.

With his death only weeks later, Joseph Smith was unable to further elaborate on these statements. We do, however, find them established in church doctrine about the preexistence and our eternal nature, and also embedded in our temple liturgy. These are doctrines of immense importance regarding our understanding of many things, including the experiences we have in mortality and dealing with the challenges and adversity that entails. None of us were born bad, nor did God create evil.

Continue reading Sunday Sermon: The Purposes and Reasons for Challenges in Our Lives →

The German-speaking nations of Germany, Austria and Switzerland were fruitful missions for the Church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, despite periods of repression. Not only did many German Saints emigrate to the American Zion, many also stayed in Europe, by choice or by financial necessity, which, by the 1930s, had resulted in branches with generations-long experience. While there were occasional clashes between youthful American missionaries and German branch leaders over some arrogant assumptions of missionaries and stubborn resistance of local leaders, the Church functioned well in that time and place. During his 1926-1932 tenure as British/European Mission president, John A. Widtsoe conducted a successful effort to transition the continental missions from missionary to local leadership, an effort that ultimately allowed Church members to maintain branch organizations and a semblance of Latter-day Saint life during even the darkest days of World War II.

Continue reading “The Hearts of the Children”: Mistaking Nazism for Gospel Principles →

This is still one of my favorite columns from the days (2007, in this case) when I wrote regularly for the Salt Lake Tribune. I repost it in acknowledgement of today’s Martin Luther King day … Let freedom ring!

Some 1,700 students and community members waited in the Union Ballroom of the University of Utah on Jan. 31, 1961. Eight o’clock came and went with no word from their featured speaker. He had not been on the scheduled plane from Denver – had he stayed home in Atlanta to care for his wife and the son who had been born only hours earlier? Still, the audience waited.

When he finally arrived, with a police escort to speed his way across the valley, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. apologized to the standing-room-only audience and explained that he had missed his Denver plane connection.

He had come to speak on the future of integration – “civil rights” was not yet a current term in Utah – and to encourage Utahns to participate in the movement. “We are standing on the threshold of the greatest period of racial development,” he said. “The most important force behind the struggle … is the non-violent resistence movement. It’s our most potent weapon.”

Continue reading Martin Luther King in Deseret →

I think all these are Christmas stories, unless some other thing sneaked in the back way.  If you’re needing something old and new, here are the stories Keepa has posted in years past, taken from the old Church magazines.

“… And Let Who Will Be Clever”
Another Mary
“As Little Children”
As Little Children
At Mary’s Feet
At Santa’s Home
Beat Glad Drums
Becky’s Present
Continue reading Links to Keepa’s Old Christmas Stories from the Old Church Magazines →

This paper was not the very first, but was one of the first papers I ever delivered at a conference. I’m posting it here because of something that came up on Threads recently. I regret that I cannot post the illustrations, although I hope someday in the not distant future to be able to post them. (As a testament to how far we have come in such matters, note that my illustrations in 2002 were not PowerPoint, but old-fashioned transparencies that I had to change by hand as I was speaking.

Hatumai: Wizard of the Wasatch

Ardis E. Parshall

Utah State History Association Annual Meeting, 2002

Proposal:

“Out of the cavernous canyons of the Wasatch, shaking off the misty mystery of centuries, in all his magic splendor and mystifying majesty, the Wizard of the Wasatch will come into the city of Salt Lake on the evening of August 9 …”

There was a time when Salt Lake City had ambitions – not entirely unrealistic – of rivaling New Orleans as a destination city for revelers. Civic boosters hosted a series of successful annual carnivals featuring festival kings, “salt princesses,” electrical parades, processions of decorated automobiles, and roped-off blocks downtown where music, dancing, vendors, and novelty acts entertained thousands of partygoers late into the night. Continue reading Hatumai: Wizard of the Wasatch →