In September of 1830, about six months after the Church had been restored, Joseph Smith received the revelation which has become section 29 of the Doctrine and Covenants. In it the Lord declares:

Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given a law which was temporal; neither any man, nor the children of men; neither Adam, your father, whom I created. (verse 34)

There have been various moments in my life when this truth has been made very clear. All things are spiritual. As we discuss ideas in the bloggernacle, it is easy to forget that that which is intellectual is also spiritual and therefore the ideas we are struggling with represent a spiritual struggle and not merely an intellectual one.

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This Friday night I will be performing as part of the Utah Puppetry Guild’s annual Puppet Variety Show: The Great Puppet Follies. The variety show features performances from some of the best puppeteers and troupes from all over the state of Utah. This year’s show features the fantastic ventriloquist and elvis impersonator: Kerry Summers.

Price: FREE
Date: Friday March 18th
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Orem Public Library, 58 North State Street, Orem, UT 84057
Click here to get driving directions

Any of you who live in or near the Utah Valley are invited to bring your families to the show. If you don’t live near Utah Valley, but have friends or family that do, let them know about it.

This was an interesting experiment and I would like to thank those of you who troubled yourselves to gather data for me. I had hoped for a greater response, but in the end I received data from 7 diverse units of the church and a total sample of 90 testimonies. Even though the units sampled were quite diverse, the unit sample size is small enough that we might suspect that data from additional units could change the results significantly.

What follows is the data collected with graphs to represent the results visually. The interpretation of the results can be discussed in the comments.

You can also view/download the data as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file here.

For background on this experiment see here and here.

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Elsewhere in the bloggernacle, Gordon Smith has posted his thoughts about scripture marking and why he no longer marks his scriptures. Several of his commentators have described their own scripture marking systems. Back in September of 2004, I wrote a blog post on Ebenezer Orthodoxy about my own concerns with scripture marking.

I have recently been experimenting with a new scripture study method as an alternative to scripture marking. I call it the Integrated Scripture Journal.

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“The Shadow of that Hideous Strength, six miles and more did shoot in length”

Last week I posted some thoughts about LDS blogger caricatures over at a bird’s eye view. Two days later a mysterious new blog appeared. The Shadow’s first post, entitled Caricatures, is a critique of some of the bloggernacle’s most prominent blogs where you will learn, among other things, that the Fowles brothers are the most dangerous minds on the net.