Our film team — Camrey Bagley Fox, Mark Goodman and his wife, James Jordan and his wife, Russell Richins, John Donovan Wilson, and my wife and I — drove today from Rochester, New York, to Kirtland, Ohio. We traversed roughly the same land route that would have been covered by the very early Latter-day Saints emigrating from the cradle of the Restoration to the newly appointed gathering place — and approximately the route that Heber C. Kimball, Joseph Young, and Brigham Young traveled when, three weeks after the death of Miriam Works Young, they journeyed to Kirtland to meet the Prophet Joseph Smith for the first time.
Once arrived in Kirtland, we set about filming outdoors, in front of the Newell K. Whitney Store. The weather was a little bit chilly, and increasingly so as the afternoon went on, but it was dry and it was far less unpleasant than it was yesterday in Mendon, New York, and environs. Elder Rory Scanlon, whom I don’t believe that I had ever met before but who was long a member of the theater program at Brigham Young University, was our helpful “accompanist” on the historic property there on the Kirtland flats. That was fun because he and our own Russ Richins (himself recently retired from the College of Fine Arts and Communications at BYU) had worked together at the University for many years.
After we finished for the day, some of us went up to the Joseph and Emma Smith home that sits very near the Kirtland Temple, where we were taken on a tour of the home by — and enjoyed a very pleasant and informative visit with — Elder and Sister Southwick.
Finally, after we had enjoyed dinner together, Mark Goodman, our director, shared with us a rough cut of the first installment of our Becoming Brigham documentary series. It included footage that we had collected several weeks ago in Carthage, Illinois. I think that we’re off to a good start, and I thank all of those who have helped us to get to this point. There’s still much that remains to be done, of course, and we would welcome further support.
We are approaching Easter. Or, as Claudia Bushman prefers to put it, we are already well into “Resurrection Month.” I hope that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and, for that matter, nonmembers of the Church as well) will watch this brief video themselves and that they will use every means available, including social media, to share it with family, friends, and complete strangers: “New Video Focuses on Christ’s ‘Greater Love.’” There is no more important message than this one. And here are some additional resources: “Finding ‘Greater Love’ Through Jesus Christ This Easter Season.”
The deep significance of the story that we commemorate during “Resurrection Month” is exceptionally clear in view of such matters as this. Some of you know Don Bradley. More of you, I think, have appreciated his work and/or been inspired by the story of his return to faith in the Restoration following a period of atheism. He is a friend, and a valued fellow Latter-day Saint. And, for what it’s worth, he wrote the Interpreter Foundation’s 2024 Christmas message. Please include him and his family in your prayers.
Three new items have been newly posted on the never-changing and virtually comatose website of the Interpreter Foundation. They include
And, thus far, these videos from the Interpreter Foundation’s Church History and Britain’s Victorian Century Lecture Series:
- “Truth Will Prevail!: Victorian Britain in the First Missionary Moment” (Jamie Horrocks)
When the LDS missionaries disembarked at Liverpool in 1837, it was both the best of times and the worst of times in Britain. The technological and economic development spurred by the Industrial Revolution had made Britain the world’s leader in the production of goods, but the shift from a rural to an industrial economy created hardship for the working poor. This is the reason many Victorian authors created “Condition of England” literature: books, poems, and essays that examined what life was like in nineteenth-century England and what it could be like, if individuals cultivated a habit of sympathy or “fellow-feeling.” This lecture offers an overview of England in the 1830s and 1840s and looks at writers like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot, all of whom attempt to teach readers how to feel for their fellow human beings.
- “The Apostles Go to England” (Dan Peterson)
In this lecture, I discuss the 1837-1838 mission of Heber C. Kimball and Orson Hyde to England and the 1839-1840 mission to Great Britain of the broader Quorum of the Twelve under the leadership of Brigham Young. These missions, especially the latter, had an enormous impact upon the Church and upon the Quorum itself. Their legacy continues still today.
Although the eventual existence of a medical school at Brigham Young University will obviously require a major (and ever-expanding) dossier in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, I have to admit that I’m very excited at the prospect — a fact that almost certainly reveals the awful blackness of my heart. But here’s an article about where things stand at the moment: “The BYU medical school’s all-gas, no-brakes goal for when it will admit its first 60 students: Inaugural dean tells conference that his initial team is racing to meet an Aug. 1 deadline that is critical for accreditation and the larger goal of opening the school’s doors”
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