…and soon thereafter negotiate for missionaries on the Caribbean island?
Many conservatives, including myself, have favored normalizing relations with Cuba for years. One Republican senator says it’s time to lift the embargo. Politics have been the principal reason for the embargo lasting this long: nobody can afford to lose the Cuban-American vote in Florida. But a recent poll shows that a majority of Cuban-Americans now opposes the embargo.
One of the more reassuring doctrines of the Gospel is the idea that we can resist Satan’s power. As this talk puts it, “the adversary can go no further than the transgressor permits him to go.”
What, then, are we to make of the First Vision?
Ok, movie fans, it’s time to vote on your favorite Mormon-themed movies. After several days of voting, M* will announce our choice as the best Mormon-themed movie, based on the poll results and our own set of random artistic criteria.
Here are the movies (we are open to other suggestions, but anybody suggesting “The Book of Mormon Movie” gets banned).
I have two contrasting stories to begin this post.
The first: six months after I was baptized into the Church, I took a job based in Brazil. Two weeks after I moved there, the bishop called me in and gave me a new calling: Young Men’s President and Sunday School Teacher for the Youth (two callings in one!). Given that there were only about eight men in the ward with the priesthood, these callings should not have been a surprise, but they certainly were at the time.
So for about a year I taught the youth for two hours nearly every Sunday. And after I had been there for a year I was visited by a friend from the States who came to Sunday School and said to me, “wow, it must be strange for you to teach a class filled with black kids.”
I turned to him and said, “what are you talking about, they aren’t black.” But then I stopped and thought about it. And indeed they all were black, and I hadn’t even noticed. I had been so nervous about simply doing the job, and so anxious to do it right, and so nervous about learning Portuguese and teaching in Portuguese, that I had never even thought about the race of the young men and women — I had simply seen them as young human beings being taught by a very imperfect teacher who knew less about the Church than they did.