Less than three weeks after Brigham Young died in 1877, Wilford Woodruff stood in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and delivered an address that was mostly sermon, part eulogy. He ended it by speaking at length about the doctrine of temple work:

Before I close, I want to say one thing to the Latter-day Saints, which is resting upon my mind. President Young having now passed away, his labors with us have ceased for the present. He, with his brethren, built and completed one Temple, also laid the foundation for one at Manti and one at Logan, and besides a great deal of work has been done on the one in this city. He left this unfinished work for us to carry on to completion; and it is our duty to rise up and build these Temples. I look upon this portion of our ministry as a mission of as much importance as preaching to the living; the dead will hear the voice of the servants of God in the spirit world, and they cannot come forth in the morning of the resurrection, unless certain ordinances are performed, for and in their behalf, in Temples built to the name of God.

Members of the church did ordinance work in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City starting in 1855, but as Brigham Young explained in 1874,

We can, at the present time, go into the Endowment House and be baptized for the dead, receive our washings and anointing, etc. … We also have the privilege of sealing women to men, … in the Endowment House; but [other ordinances] … cannot be done without a Temple.

Continue reading The Eminent Women of the St. George Temple →

Karl Püschel sent the following letter in 1918 to Der Stern, the publication of the Swiss-German Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the time, he was serving in the German army in Belgium. If our identification is correct, Karl Wilhelm Püschel was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1899 to Oscar Karl Friedrich Theodor Püschel and Christiane Barbara Merkel, baptized in 1908, and died in 1936.

When he says “brothers and sisters” in the letter, he would mean the members of the church rather than his own three sisters, Augusta Clara, Klara Babette, and Paula.

The English translation is below the German text. Many thanks to Mark E. Butler for helping with the translation.

Continue reading Karl Püschel: “Far Away from My Home”: A Latter-day Saint in the German Army, 1918 →

Yesterday’s post reproducing plans for housing 40 families in a United Order/Order of Enoch-style community, including facilities for their recreation and religious gatherings — and especially the communal kitchen — fired the imagination of other bloggers. First came J. Stapley’s “In Zion, Who Takes Out the Trash?” exploring whether freeing a part of the people from the necessary drudgery of life by expecting another part of the people to do such work actually negates the Zion we speak of building. And this morning comes Amy Tanner Thiriot’s post looking at some instances from 19th century church history when Latter-day Saints actually tried to live the communal ideal of “the big table” by dining together as well as sharing food preparation and clean-up chores in a common kitchen. The common kitchen was an important feature of the house plans presented in yesterday’s post — but in that plan, unlike in the very real communities described here, the architecture provided for individual family dining rooms rather than at “the big table.”

So how did that communal dining experience work out in real life? Read on.

Brigham Young called two hundred families to settle the Little Colorado River Valley in northeastern Arizona in 1876. One of the purposes of the mission was to establish United Order settlements, organized on the principle of mutual cooperation rather than competition.

Continue reading Guest Post: The Big Table: An Experiment in Communal Living →