Elder Nelson and Wendy L. Watson “were married today in the Salt Lake Temple. This is the second marriage for Elder Nelson and the first for Wendy Watson.” She’s a professor at BYU, getting ready to retire in a few weeks. I’m happy for the happy couple 🙂
Author Archives: guest
The (lack of?) power of intercessory prayer
According to a recently-released study, intercessory prayer doesn’t work. The post title is linked to the Slate.com story because it links to a bunch of other news stories (interesting for their commentary). The study itself is in the April issue of American Heart Journal. (This links to the editorial in the journal. The study itself is not available for free, but if it is worth $30 to you, you can get it here; it is fourth from the bottom.)
It’s an interesting topic to study, but wouldn’t the faith of those praying make a difference? How would you measure that to make sure those praying met the level of faith required? And what would be the level required? It seems there must also be a humility of “thy will be done†involved. In addition, the random prayer (in the sense that random people were assigned to pray for a random, unknown person, if I correctly understand what they did) seems almost pointless. Would you be able to have the faith that such a person would be healed? Would you really care that much?
General Conference in Pictures
Despite the fact that I’ve lived in Utah most of my life, I’d never been to General Conference until this weekend. In the tabernacle days, the idea of standing in line all night in order to maybe get in sounded miserably unappealing. However, even since the conference center has been used, it still didn’t call to me. It’s just really nice to sleep in and then watch conference on TV in my pajamas or sweats or whatever. But for some reason, when my bishop announced that he had tickets to a couple sessions, I really, really wanted to go. Weird, I know. As soon as sacrament meeting was over, I threw myself over the benches, flinging sunbeams and deacons over my shoulders, and stopped with a screech in front of the bishop to ask for a couple tickets. (I may have exaggerated a bit in that previous sentence.)
Thus I found myself in Salt Lake this weekend, with tickets to the Saturday morning and Sunday morning sessions of conference. I brought my camera along and thought I’d share some images. (There are lots of pictures below, so it’s not the most dial-up friendly post. I have dial-up, so I feel your pain.)
Mormon World Records
An article in today’s Deseret News led me to the Mormon World Records website. The article came about because of an earlier article that apparently wasn’t researched enough: just which ward has the most twins? Who knew such things could be so controversial or competitive?
Baby blessings?
I really don’t want to seem like I’m attacking anyone, so please take what I am about to discuss in the most charitable way:
I get rather upset by some baby blessings. I don’t think I should, but I do.