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 →

Keepa was the first LDS blog to regularly use images — they are a key component of showing our history.

I have used a paid service to host my images, one that has provided a link for each image, that I can then plug into posts. Images posted that way have been of markedly higher quality than those I upload through WordPress, as you can see from the poor quality of the Arrington Lecture flyer posted just before this sad rant.

That service has, without warning, changed its business model. The money I am paying now allows only storage, not linking. To use a link for posting on Keepa, I must now pay an additional $156 per year, something I simply cannot afford.

I do not know what this means for images already illustrating posts — will they remain as is? will links go away because they are now disallowed on my plan?

Continue reading Keepa’s Illustrations →

(A somewhat fuller story can be found on Keepa here. Below is the version published as a Salt Lake Tribune column on 3 March 2012, offered as a lure to Keepa’ninnies who may not have been readers in 2012.)

How do you write the biography of a child who died so long ago that no one remembers her, or how she sounded when she laughed or what she liked to do? Utah’s past is well stocked with the short lives of children who left little mark in this world, no matter how great a hole they left in their families when they died.

Anne Maria Jewkes was born in Fountain Green, Utah, on September 18, 1866. Her parents were Samuel Jewkes and Mary Nash Gardner, emigrants from England who met in St. Louis and married after they reached Utah. By all accounts, theirs was a happy family.

Continue reading A Life Too Short: Biography of a Small Child →

First published as a “Living History” column in the Salt Lake Tribune, 8 October 2011.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the American Civil War was well under way. The Union and the Confederacy had fought the First Battle of Bull Run and a number of lesser skirmishes; the bloodbaths of Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg were still in our future.

Utah’s direct involvement in the Civil War was minuscule. Some 106 cavalrymen under Lot Smith served for 90 days guarding western mail and telegraph routes. The 3rd California Volunteers under Patrick Connor built Fort Douglas on the bench east of Salt Lake City. A minuscule handful of Utahns individually joined eastern regiments.

But while Utah sent few men to fight and die on either side of the conflict, Utah’s Civil War heritage is much broader. After the war, hundreds – more than 1,500 – veterans who had served in units raised in other places settled in Utah to make this state their home for decades. These men are part of our Civil War heritage – not because they went out from us to serve, but because they brought the legacy of their service back to enrich the life of Utah.

Continue reading Utah’s Civil War Veterans →

Samuel Henry Sharman, age 21, arrived in Utah from Montana in 1900, filled with dreams and determination. An early adopter of the automobile, Sam opened his own dealership in Salt Lake by at least 1906, selling first the Maxwell and later Cadillacs and Chevrolets.

For recreation, Sam liked to hunt ducks on the Great Salt Lake. Although he lived at the north end of the Salt Lake Valley, he had ties to the Duckville Gun Club based in the Bear River Bay to the north.

And that bit of geography between his home and his favorite hunting grounds was a bit of a problem. He had his automobile, of course, but it still took a couple of hours out of his hunting day to drive to Corinne. It might have been faster to go by water, but between dry land and the nearest open water lay an ever-changing borderland of marsh and mud flat.

Continue reading Samuel Henry Sharman’s Amphibious Vessel (Utah History) →

“I was born in the year 1847 on a plantation in Alabama,” Lu Dalton began her autobiography. Her family moved to Texas where her parents (John Percival and Eliza Foscue Lee) were converted to Mormonism in 1849. The family came to Utah in 1850, moved on to San Bernardino in 1851, and settled in Beaver, Utah in the winter of 1857-58. Her parents “were so poor,” she wrote, “that sometimes we wanted bread … But during the deepest of his poverty, my father, determined that his children should not be ignorant as well as poor, at the close of his day’s work patiently taught us.”

Lu was far in advance of other children her age when she entered the public school, kept there at the considerable sacrifice of her mother. “Thou I did not then know, I now know how she sat by her candle far into the night while I slept, to keep up with woman’s everlasting work so that she could still spare me, her eldest daughter (her mother’s right hand) to attend school. I was not ungrateful even then, for I loved my books and came to know the head of the class as my rightful place.”

Continue reading Lucinda (“Lu”) Lee Dalton: One of our Mormon Poets →