Earlier this month I traveled to Utah for a family funeral. While there, I came across Sister Saints by Professor Colleen McDannell. Professor McDannell is noted as one of today’s leading interpreters of American religion. She has lived in Utah for several decades as a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah and has observed her neighbors with the unique eye only an outsider can truly have.

Unfortunately for me, Professor McDannell was not in the United States during my visit, so I was only able to read her book, which tells a story of how women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have impacted their Church and the world.

The book is well worth reading.

Professor McDannell begins by talking of Emmeline Woodward [Wells], who had joined the Church during Joseph Smith’s lifetime as a teenage bride. By 1884 Emmeline was one of the leading women of the Church, participating in the Relief Society headed by an aging Eliza R. Snow.

The Lord has said:

3Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal…;

D&C 29:34

On Earth Day, it is worth remembering that we are to be wise stewards of the earth, to preserve it for future generations [Environmental Stewardship and Conservation].

A Parable

I will liken the unwise steward to a new employee at the hotel at which my colleague stayed this weekend. I will liken the earth’s resources to the contents of my colleagues purse.

At some point, my colleague went to get her phone. It was missing, as were two other items of worth. When my colleague looked online to locate her phone, she saw that it was traveling around the city where she had stayed. My colleague called the hotel and talked to her friend in management. Within moments, the friend had reviewed the hotel’s surveillance tapes for the estimated time of loss and identified who had taken the items.

The thief was a new employee, one who apparently was unaware that their actions were knowable, one who didn’t realize that the location of an active phone can be detected by the owner.

In like manner, our actions are known to God. When we effectively take that which is needed by our fellows or our future kin, God is aware.

Saving Ourselves

There are times when we think we are modern and enlightened, and that therefore old superstitions need not be heeded.

This Sunday I heard Krista Tippett’s 2006 interview with the late Wangari Maathai, a Catholic environmentalist.