News for Mormons

From The USA Today:

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A son of Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid was accepted into a drug treatment program and will be released from prison early.

Britt Reid, 22, pleaded guilty last month to driving under the influence of a controlled substance over the summer. But a Montgomery County judge paroled him Friday to drug court and he will likely be released from prison by Monday, prosecutors said.

Under the drug program, Reid will undergo regular drug tests and must show up in court once a week, Senior Deputy Attorney General E. Marc Costanzo said. Reid also must continue to hold down a job.

Britt Reid pleaded guilty Jan. 17 to DUI and drug charges filed when he drove into a shopping cart in a parking lot in August while out on bail on a road rage charge. He has since been sentenced to eight to 23 months in prison in the road rage case, in which he flashed a gun at another motorist.

There was no answer at the office of Reid’s attorney Friday afternoon and the voice mailbox was full.

Entire article here

From KVPI.com:

National conservative talk show host Glenn Beck made a stop at BYU-Idaho today before his benefit concert in Idaho Falls tonight. He addressed the Young Republicans and also talked more about his life.

From The Associated Press:

DENVER (AP) — Republican Mitt Romney is conceding the bulk of the Northeast to rival John McCain, counting instead on his home state of Massachusetts, a split in California and wins in a series of caucus states on Super Tuesday.

Missing from the latest Romney presidential campaign schedule were winner-take-all states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, which account for 180 of the 1,023 delegates at stake. The omissions were telling with voting in 21 GOP contests on Tuesday.

The former Massachusetts governor was in Colorado Friday and planned to attend the funeral of Mormon church President Gordon B. Hinckley on Saturday in Utah. Romney also scheduled campaign events in Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia and West Virginia before arriving home Tuesday.

Colorado and Minnesota are caucuses states where a grass-roots effort could help secure a win, while West Virginia will award its delegates at a convention Romney plans to address before flying to Massachusetts to both vote and await the returns. Romney has also deployed four of his five sons to Maine, Montana and Idaho, which hold caucuses on Saturday and Tuesday, and Alaska, which has a party convention on Tuesday.

If he fails to capture enough delegates to offset McCain’s likely wins in other states and strong showing in California, where the Arizona senator has the backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Romney could end his campaign in Boston on Wednesday.

Entire article here

From The National Guard website:

Utah Army National Guard Sgt. Jill Stevens’ quest to capture the crown as the 80th Miss America ended with a flurry of pushups on the stage of the nationally-televised pageant Saturday, Jan. 26.

Stevens, Miss Utah, immediately assumed the front leaning rest position and gave the audience at least 10 pushups after host Mark Steines announced that she would not be one of the evening’s 10 finalists. Other contestants joined “GI Jill” during the brief demonstration of upper-body strength.

She did, however, find satisfaction from winning the America’s Choice part of the competition which made her one of the 16 initial finalists. A panel of celebrity judges eliminated her and five others following the swimsuit competition, the first event during the final night of the pageant televised live on cable’s TLC.

“I think it made a stronger statement than winning Miss America,” Stevens said the following day. “To be America’s Choice is an honor. To me, I won last night.”

Kirsten Haglund, Miss Michigan, won the 2008 Miss America crown, that she will wear for the next year, and a $50,000 college scholarship.

Stevens walked off the stage with a smile and a wave to join the other contestants who the judges had previously eliminated. She received a $4,000 scholarship.

Entire article here

From The Wocester Telegram and Gazette:

                   Julianne Hough

Burke hasn’t had one minute of vacation since she signed on with the show in 2005. There are two TV seasons each year, a fall one and a spring one, and then the live tours in between. Burke has done them all and while dancers don’t yet know who will be called back for season 6, if Burke does gets the call she will go straight into rehearsals after the live tour wraps up Feb. 10 in Philadelphia. The first episode of the new season airs March 17.

“I’ve had no vacations, but this is really like a huge vacation for me,” she said. “I meet such great people. You get to experience things that you never would have dreamed of as a kid growing up and it’s really a lot of fun. I’m doing what I love to do and dancing is my passion so this is not even work.”

So, after so much time on the road, does the cast become friends?

“We’re more than friends. We’re a huge family,” she said. What about Julianne Hough, the pro dancer who has won the TV crown the past two years, with Olympian speed skater Apolo Anton Ono, then last season with race car driver Helio Castroneves. Is there a rivalry?

“I don’t think so,” Burke said. “I think we’re just happy for each other. I know what it takes and she knows what it takes and she’s worked hard. It takes an awful lot of work to get there and I think if anything we can both relate to that and we’re proud of each other.”

Entire article here

From The Associated Press:

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, poses in his office Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008, in Salt Lake City. Uchtdorf is the only member of the Quorum of the Twelve born outside the United States. He said LDS retention is remarkably high given that the church relies on a lay, unpaid congregational leaders. But Uchdorf also said that in areas with fast growth potential, the church must grow “slowly and in a natural, healthy way” so those leaders are well grounded in doctrine. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

PROVO, Utah (AP) — Every Wednesday, hundreds of young Mormon men and women not far removed from high school arrive on the campus of Brigham Young University, where they are severed from family and text-messaging and entrusted with the very future of their faith.

Sequestered in classrooms for 14 hours a day, these missionaries-in-training are taught to boil down core doctrines to make them understandable and consistent, whether their audience is in Utah or Uganda.

But increasingly, classroom conversations at the Mormon church’s flagship Missionary Training Center have centered not just on winning new believers but on keeping them — a topic looming as a critical challenge for whoever is picked to succeed church president and prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, who died Sunday at 97.

Although retaining members is a challenge for all evangelizing faiths, the Mormon church appears to have a particularly poor retention rate in some countries.

The foreign retention rate is critical to the future of the Mormon church. An American-born denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now boasts more members abroad than at home — about 55 percent of the world’s 13 million Mormons live outside the U.S., according to church figures.

The Mormons are working hard to maintain doctrinal integrity and still compete in the spiritual marketplace for converts. The effort is playing out at the Missionary Training Center, which is equal parts language lab, college dorm and proselytizing think tank.

The largest of 17 such centers around the world, the 4,000-capacity Provo MTC trains young men and women for three to 12 weeks. The length of stay depends on whether the missionary is learning one of the 53 languages taught here and its degree of difficulty.

All able Mormon men are expected to embark on a two-year mission at 19. The center’s halls teem with polite young men who wear dark suits and washable polyester ties they swap like trading cards in the mission field. There is a smattering of women preparing for 18-month trips.

The closest thing to a student union is a basement laundry room, where missionaries on their day off, or Preparation Day, relax in jeans and sweat shirts and write weekly letters home. Or they can send e-mail, though no more than 30 minutes on the Internet is allowed.

Entire story here

From The St. George Spectrum:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints late President Gordon B. Hinckley urged the members frequently to get out of debt, pay off their houses and live within their means. It did not take a prophet to see that America’s economic house was built on the edge of an eroded cliff and that the torrential rains would soon send it sliding down. His warnings were largely ignored.

Conversely, President Bush in response to 9/11 pronounced that it was American’s patriotic duty to spend more. He said al-Qaida was trying to intimidate us into an economic retrenchment. Now that was the kind of leadership America likes. Give us some more tax money and some lower interest rates and we will be glad to spend our way out of any threatened recession.

During World War II, Americans were asked to buy savings bonds. We were asked to sacrifice our personal consumption to produce and to save. Now the Bush/Reagan voo-doo economics tells us that we can afford to conduct trillion dollar wars across the globe so long as we keep spending. Deficits? No problem. We’ll just borrow the deficit from our enemies.

Our flagrant debt mongering comes at a time when the manufacturing segment of our economy has declined to modern lows. Where is government leadership in fostering the manufacture of real wealth? Americans are not concerned that nearly all the electronic goods, televisions, computers, clothes and shoes they buy come from Asia. We don’t think we need to produce anything. We make our money speculating on real estate.President Hinckley said we should pay off our home. But that bucks government policy. We get our best tax deduction from home mortgage interest. How many times over the last years of the real estate bubble did we hear financial gurus advise us to borrow against our homes to buy more real estate. With this “leverage” one need not actually earn capital to invest. The Federal Reserve Banks’ lowering of interest rates was designed to promote this speculative bubble in housing. After selling a parcel of real estate the tax law encouraged the purchase of another parcel to avoid tax. Government policies induce spending and discourage savings. We have thus become the biggest debtor nation in history.

Our savings rate is now in the negative. In the aggregate the individuals in our nation spend more than we receive in income. The savings rate in China is 50 percent, in Japan in the 25 to 30 percent category. China promotes our consumerism by selling us cheap goods. We pay in dollars, and China invests its dollars, in U.S. treasury notes. We owe China more than $400 billion in treasury notes. Our trade imbalance with China now amounts to $1.4 trillion - $4,000 of debt for every American.

Entire article here

From GetReligion.com:

This is, methinks, why God created weblogs.

There’s quite a bit of buzz out there right now in evangelical circles about a series of informational videos that are up and running at CitizenLink.org — which is part of the wider kingdom linked to an activist by the name of James Dobson. The videos feature clips of recent webcasts with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Right now, everyone is asking — will Dobson endorse either (gasp) Mitt Romney or (gasp!) John McCain? It is in that context that the following blog item by Michael Scherer appears at Time, with the pushy headline: “A stealth Mitt Romney endorsement from the religious right’s powerbrokers?”

The clip on Rudy Giuliani is harsh (note that reference to dancing in drag). No surprise. The McCain video says voters have no way of knowing what the senator will do next. No surprise. Then the video on Mike Huckabee is surprisingly critical. No surprise?

After praising Huckabee’s social views, both Perkins and Tom Minnery, a policy expert at Focus on the Family, hammer the former Arkansas governor for his foreign policy views. Minnery suggests that Huckabee does not understand the cause for which American troops are dying in Iraq. Then Perkins suggests that Huckabee lacks the fiscal and national security credentials needed for a conservative presidential candidate. “The conservatives have been successful in electing candidates, and presidents in particular, when they have had a candidate that can address not only the social issues, [but] the fiscal issues and the defense issues,” says Perkins. “[Huckabee] has got to reach out to the fiscal conservatives and the security conservatives.” Ouch.

Now hang on, here comes the buried lede.

So what about Romney? He comes up roses. “He has staked out positions on all three of the areas that we have discussed,” says Perkins. “I think he continues to be solidly conservative.” Then Minnery defends Romney from criticism that he is too polished and smooth. “Mitt Romney has acknowledged that Mormonism is not a Christian faith,” Minnery adds. “But on the social issues we are so similar.”

Now wait just a minute. Romney said what?

There was, of course, the quote in the big religion speech in which he said:

“What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history.”

Yes, here we go again. But let’s focus — oh ye comment-link clickers — on the journalistic fact here that must be chased. Where in the heck did Romney acknowledge that “Mormonism is not a Christian faith”? Did Scherer realize how controversial that statement is for millions of people on both sides of the issue?

What did Romney say and where and when did he say it? Or are the Dobson folks grasping at straws as they prepare their flock for an endorsement?

Entire article here

From The Deseret Morning News:

Utah is going to spend $1.3 million next week holding a presidential primary election statewide.

Now, since it is undemocratic to speak against a public vote of the people, I have to start out by saying a presidential primary in Utah is a good thing. And every registered voter should take advantage of their franchise and vote.

Having stated that, Utah political leaders will, once again, be frustrated in their main presidential primary goal: Actually get leading candidates to Utah to learn about our shared concerns with other Western states and our own unique problems here.

Yes, that’s right.

Except for a few campaign TV and radio ads, the GOP and Democratic candidates aren’t coming here before Tuesday’s vote.

That’s because they have better — more important politically — places to be.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Hey, sometimes we aren’t even invited to the wedding.

Now, Barack Obama was actually scheduled to come on Saturday for some brief campaigning. But he canceled because of LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley’s funeral, held the same day. Now we get Mrs. Obama on Monday.

We got Chelsea Clinton this week — I suppose we should be glad for even a candidate’s child or spouse.

Entire article here

From The Salt Lake Tribune:

The Mormon faithful wiped away tears, hugged one another and quietly reminisced about President Gordon B. Hinckley this morning as the first of two days of planned viewings of the man they believe to be their “prophet, seer and revelator” got under way.

Michelle McAllister, a 21-year-old Weber State University student from Layton, was first in line to view Hinckley’s body, which was dressed in temple clothing and laid out surrounded by flowers in the Hall of the Prophets at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City.

She and friend Kelsey Cox, 19, of the Layton area, arose around 4 a.m. and braved freezing temperatures to be first in line. McAllister at one point resorted to putting her gloves on her feet to stay warm.

“This is ‘The Amazing Race’ for us,” she said. “We were the first team here.”

She and her friend talked of Hinckley’s optimism for the future and of the inspiration he provided to LDS young people. “He has been our prophet,” McAllister said.

Employees of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were allowed in to the viewing starting at 7 a.m., and other mourners followed beginning at 9 a.m. Although the crowd was large and waits in line were long, people streamed steadily past the president, pausing only to lift children for a better view or to dry their eyes.

Entire article here