For the first time in more than 20 years, the LDS Church has produced a new film for use in its temple rituals.

Its actors are all new and production values enhanced, say those who have seen it. But “there have been no changes to the script,” says church spokeswoman Ruth Todd.

Mormon temple ceremonies include a ritual re-enactment of the creation, Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, mortal experience of the world, and the return to God’s presence. At each stage of this progression, participants make covenants with God in the name of Jesus Christ.

Pope Francis startled everyone this week with his seemingly tolerant statement to the press about gays in the church.

“If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?” the pontiff said in an off-the-cuff news conference en route to Rome from Brazil, according to the Washington Post. “They shouldn’t be marginalized.

In answer to a question about the so-called “gay lobby” in the Vatican, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics said, “When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby.” Then, according to a transcript provided by the Nation...

Mostly, the LDS Church’s new missionary grooming standards make “elders” (male) and “sisters” (female) appear more, well, up-to-date — like contemporary professionals.

But one change seems inexplicable — skinny ties are on the forbidden list, along with string, bow or wide ties.

These Mormon ambassadors are expected to choose “only business- or professional-style ties,” and even a men’s fashion magazine says ties should not be too thin or too fat.

“At GQ, we like a narrow — but not super-skinny — tie, about two and a quarter to two and three-quarter inch...

The Provo LDS temple has made RealClearReligion’s “ugliest churches” list.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this list, like all such assessments, is subjective. It favors more traditional religious architecture, while mocking modern expressions.

Still, Nicholas G. Hahn III, deputy editor of RealClearReligion, defends his choices.

“Not only are these artistic innovations ugly, but also bizarre, weird, dumb, and gross,” Hahn writes. “These holy train wrecks come to you from Monroe, Ohio, to Uvari, India. Gaze upon these Catholic chap...

Hans Mattsson, at one time an LDS area authority who helped oversee the LDS Church in Europe, says now that his faith has been shaken by facts about Mormon history that he discovered online.

“I felt like I had an earthquake under my feet,” Mattsson, now an emeritus area authority, told The New York Times. “Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been proud to preach about and witness about just crumbled under my feet. It was such a terrible psychological and nearly physical disturbance.”

Mattsson may be the highest-ranking Mormon official to go public with his move from disciple to doub...

Mormon missionaries may be giving up the door-to-door approach just as a Catholic nun is taking it up — and in LDS territory.

Sister Margery Therese Harkin, accompanied by seminarians or lay people, is knocking on doors in Phoenix to ask “if there are any baptized Catholics in residence and inviting them to church,” according to a story in the The Catholic Sun.

“We always tell them that the priest sent us,” Harkin told the paper. “Just as the apostles were sent, we never go in our own name.”

She and two other sisters reside in a convent at Christ the Ki...

A few weeks after creating a new Mormon mission in Botswana, LDS leaders are temporarily moving five missionaries assigned to the south African nation.

“Due to a recent change in its forms and processes, the government of Botswana is not currently granting new visas or some visa renewals,” church spokeswoman Ruth Todd said in a statement. “While those visa issues are being resolved, affected missionaries will be temporarily moved to nearby countries.”

Mormons have had a small presence in Botswana since the early 1990s, when the Utah-based church organized its first branch there. The faith ...

On the same evening that the George Zimmerman verdict came down in the Trayvon Martin case, Mel Hamilton was in Provo, describing to an eager crowd his experience 44 years ago as a black football player protesting Mormonism’s former priesthood ban.

In 1969, Hamilton was one of the so-called “Black 14” — African-American players on the University of Wyoming’s football team — who planned to wear black armbands in their game against LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University to symbolize their opposition to the Utah-based faith’s policy (discarded in 1978) of excluding black men from holding its all-male priesthood.

The image of Mormon missionaries roaming the streets in dark suits is changing.

According to new dress-and-grooming standards, male missionaries no longer are required to wear suits “during everyday [proselytizing] activities.”

Instead, they can be dressed as young professionals in white shirts, ties and dress slacks (even lighter-colored ones).

Suits — including light grays or browns — will be reserved for Sundays or special occasions.

For years, many Mormon missions allowed their “elders” to go without full suits d...

Christians use more “positive” words in their 140-character messages on the online social network Twitter than atheists and appear to be happier.

So say University of Illinois researchers after doing a computer analysis of nearly 2 million tweets.

Believers also were more likely to tweet about their “social relations.”

But the believers, the study found, “engage in less analytical thinking” than nonbelievers.

The findings were reported in the journal, Social Psychological & Personality Science, according to a news rel...

A modern Orthodox Jewish bride-to-be had some specific requirements for her bridesmaid dresses: They had to be pretty (no “sky-blue taffeta monstrosity with a mermaid frill and a plunging neckline”), affordable (under $250) and — here’s the kicker — modest.

By that, Arielle Landau, meant they had to have hemlines past the knee, sleeves and reveal no cleavage.

She scoured the Internet looking under the categories of “Modern Orthodox bridesmaids dresses” and “Jewish bridesmaid dresses.” Some were too pricey, some too modest, she writes in the New York Daily News, “covering everything from cl...

Mormon founder Joseph Smith spent a lot of time in courtrooms, fighting allegations of wrongdoing and wrangling for his legal rights.

Finally, Smith was murdered June 27, 1844 — 169 years ago today — by an armed mob in Carthage, Ill., while awaiting yet another trial.

Now, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a division of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and Illinois Supreme Court Preservation Commission, are taking up one of his cases in a re-enactment. And LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks, former Utah Supreme Court justice, will weigh in.

The Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest Catholic lay organization, set an “all-time record for charitable donations and service hours in 2012,” according to a news release.

The Knights’ “Annual Survey of Fraternal Activity” reported that for the year ending Dec. 31, 2012, “record amounts of money and hours — more than $167.5 million and 70 million hours — were donated to charitable causes.”

The Knights’ financial contribution in 2012 grew by more than $9.4 million from the previous year — to $167,549,817, the release said.

The number of volunteer se...

The LDS Church’s announcement that it is broadcasting what it says will be a “historic” meeting on Sunday, June 23, has Mormons buzzing.

For the first time, members, who have been encouraged to watch the broadcast at their local chapels, will get a glimpse of a special session of the annual New Mission Presidents seminar, typically closed to the public. This is also the largest class of new mission presidents on record — more than 150 — because the Utah-based faith is adding 58 new missions worldwide.

The session, titled“The Work of Salvation,” will be broadcast from the Marriott Center in...

The Catholic Academy for Communication Professionals is giving a Brigham Young University original film project its highest honor: the 2013 Gabriel Award for “best entertainment.”

“Silent Night,” a full-length, BYUtv movie, was filmed in Austria and tells the story of the popular Christmas carol, written in the 19th century by priest and composer Joseph Mohr.

The international Vatican-approved communications organization for the Catholic Church was looking for works that “uplift and nourish the human spirit.” A Gabriel-worthy film “affirms the dignity of human persons; it recognizes and u...

Openly gay clergy in the Anglican Church can be considered as bishop candidates, but only if they are not having sex.

“Under a new policy any priest in a civil partnership will have to convince an archbishop that they are not sexually active before their name can go forward,” John Bingham writes in The Telegraph.

Bingham reports that a briefing paper drawn up by the church’s legal office says that “sexual orientation should be ‘irrelevant’ in assessing someone’s suitability to become a bishop. But it maintains the requirement for celibacy, adding that bishops’ private lives must be in acc...

Hundreds of Bountiful High graduates lined up to receive their diplomas at the Regional Center in Woods Cross on Friday, many of whom have already received their LDS mission assignments since the minimum age went from 19 to 18 for young men.

As is the custom, graduating seniors wrote their names on a card to be read aloud as they crossed the stage. Apparently, dozens of young men added what appeared to be the place of their Mormon mission as a “middle name” – as in John “Russia” Doe and James “New York” Smith.

By the end, perhaps 50 or more had done this, according to one parent in attenda...

Ever wonder how the Chinese got to Utah, how Mormons relate to Freethinkers, or how single LDS men fit into the faith’s intellectual landscape in the 19th century?

If so, you can join hundreds of historians from all over the country at the Mormon History Association’s annual conference, which began Thursday at the Davis Conference Center in Layton.

The three-day conference — organized under the theme “The Crowded Landscapes of the Mormon West(s): Agency and Action From the Wasatch Front to the Pacific Rim” — offers a potpourri of fascinating topics relating to LDS history.

On Sunday, the LDS Church’s governing First Presidency asked Mormons to contribute more to the church’s missionary fund — either through their congregation or at the faith’s headquarters.

In a letter read over the pulpit in all congregations, the three-man presidency explained the reason: explosive growth in the full-time, all-volunteer force since October 2012.

That was when LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson announced that the Utah-based faith was lowering the minimum age for male missionaries from 19 to 18 and for females from 21 to 19.

At that tim...

Overshadowed by all the publicity about Mormons Building Bridges — a group of Latter-day Saints that takes no position on political or theological issues — a separate band of believers is slowly building momentum.

It’s called Mormons for Equality, and its members fully support gay marriage and other rights.

Because of a technical issue with the registration, Mormons for Equality will not be marching in Sunday’s Pride parade in Salt Lake City as an independent contingent, but will join with two other organizations: the ACLU and Unitarian Universalists.

“...

As the nation anticipates further implementation in January 2014 of the Affordable Care Act, which requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide insurance for their full-time employees, LDS Church-owned Deseret Industries has cut its workers’ hours to fewer than 30.

In doing so, DI, as it is known, will not have to provide health coverage for these employees.

In recent years, the DI has become one of the premier places in Utah where refugees and others can find work.

Its one-year training program allows people fleeing from any number of war-to...

The sight of 350 Mormons dressed in their Sunday best marching in Utah’s 2012 Pride Parade was, well, stunning. It made national and even international news, playing against the presumption that members of the Utah-based faith were at odds with their gays members and friends.

This year, the group Mormons Building Bridges plans to do it all again at next weekend’s parade — and is expecting even more marchers, perhaps up to 500.

“All year long our organization has been listening to and learning from those who have been working for decades for the LGBT cause,” Bridges organizer Erika Munson s...

Should someone married to a non-Jew become a rabbi?

The question has arisen among Reform Jews at this time because Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the movement’s central rabbinical school, is reconsidering a policy requiring that prospective students sign an agreement that “any student engaged, married, or partnered/committed to a person who is not Jewish by birth or conversion will not be admitted or ordained.”

Dana Evan Kaplan, a rabbi in Kingston, Jamaica, supports the policy as a way of maintaining Jewish identity for a movement he says “is losing its religious focus...

Respect for religious freedom is waning as more Americans abandon organized churches, and the only way to bring it back is through systematic education.

Those were the conclusions of LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks in his address Thursday in New York City to more than 600 people, including religious leaders of numerous faiths.

The event was an annual award ceremony sponsored by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest organization “dedicated to protecting free expression of religious traditions,” according to a release on the LDS Church website.

A doe-eyed 13-year-old Mormon boy named Jordan looks into the camera and says he was planning to disappear after college so his parents wouldn’t have to suffer any shame because of him.

Why? Because he is gay.

In a riveting new video produced by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, Jordan and his LDS parents describe their experience of coping with the boy’s sexuality in the context of Mormonism.

The 20-minute video traces the California couple’s transition from viewing same-sex attraction as evil and supporting the state’s Pr...

Now at least one branch of Mormonism is poised to embrace same-sex marriage.

At their national meeting last month, delegates in the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the second largest group that traces its origins to Mormon founder Joseph Smith) voted overwhelmingly to approve the ordination of gay people and marriages or covenant commitment services of gay couples.

The move had three elements:

• That the “sacrament of marriage be extended, where legal in the USA, to persons of the same sex/gende...

Kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart made national headlines this week by saying that she didn’t try to escape from her captors because she felt like a “chewed-up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.”

Having been repeatedly raped, Smart told a Johns Hopkins human-trafficking forum, it was “easy ... to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value. Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

Smart said she heard the chewed-gum analogy from a teacher. Now, many commenters ...

Just in time for Mother’s Day, the LDS Church’s magazine for children intends to show how much the faith’s leaders revered the women who gave them life.

The May issue of the Friend carries this article by Lori M. Johansen, “Remembering Mothers: Stories From Our Prophets.” It recounts how these moms sacrificed for their sons, nurtured them in faith, gave money to the poor and more.

Each brief anecdote is attached to a particular Mormon prophet — Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Joseph F. Smith, Heber J. Grant, Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson.

There’s...

Islamic burial rites dictate that the deceased should be buried as quickly as possible — most often within 24 hours — so there is no need for embalming or preserving the body.

Yet it’s been three days since the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, and it’s unclear what happened to his body or whether he will have a Muslim funeral.

It’s a problem for American Muslims, writes Jaweed Kaleem at the Huffington Post.

Tsarnaev died Friday after a shootout with police and his body was “turned over to the law enforcement for ...

Longtime Mormon general authority H. Burke Peterson — who helped oversee the LDS Church’s physical facilities, its massive translation efforts, and its programs for young men and women — died Sunday. He was 89.

In 1972, Peterson, a World War II veteran and successful engineer in Arizona, accepted a full-time assignment as first counselor in the LDS Presiding Bishopric, which oversaw the Utah-based faith’s “temporal affairs,” including its many building projects, health and welfare services and “tithes and offerings.”

As part of a three-member “bishopric” — including Bishop Victor L. Brown ...

Catholic and Mormon feminists are not the only ones to face opposition from all-male leadership in their respective faiths. Russian Orthodox woman do, too.

Last week, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called feminism “a very dangerous phenomenon,” which could lead to the downfall of the “family and, if you wish, the homeland,” according a Reuters report.

“Man turns his sight outward, he should work, make money, while a woman is always focused inwards towards her children, her home,” Kirill told a group of Orthodox women. “If this exceptionally important role of a woma...

Two days after women offered prayers at LDS General Conference for the first time in the faith’s 183-year history, some Mormons still are celebrating the moment as well as the church’s other recent strides in gender equality.

These feminists point to institutional moves, such as modernizing the LDS Young Women’s program, lowering the missionary age for young women, and including women in mission leadership teams. And, though some disagree with the point of view on priesthood in the church’s recent video interview with its top female authorities — that men and women have different but equally vital roles — they applaud the fa...

AIDS is declining in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks largely to religious leaders and their sermons about abstinence and fidelity.

That seems counterintuitive to some Westerners, who presume that churches oppose the distribution of condoms and that ministers cite the HIV epidemic as evidence of God’s wrath.

Such Western observers often believe that any progress in preventing or managing the devastating illness must have come exclusively from the use of medicine with the help of American and European nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Not so, researchers ...

What do Utah and the Deep South have in common other than, say, a love for fried chicken?

Faith.

Gallup announced Friday that the Provo-Orem area — home to LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University — is the most religious of 189 metropolitan areas surveyed last year, with 77 percent of residents identifying as “very religious.”

The Ogden-Clearfield area didn’t do too shabby either, tying for eighth on the list with 55 percent of residents classified as highly religious.

Salt Lake City, world headquarters of The Chu...

The LDS Church has continued to call about 1,400 new missionaries a week, which is double the number the Utah-based faith was seeing before October 2012, when it lowered the minimum missionary age from 19 to 18 for males and 21 to 19 for females.

Currently, there are 64,373 missionaries, according to a release from the LDS Church late Wednesday. That’s about 9,000 higher than it was before the announcement. If the applications continue at this clip, the church could have more than 70,000 missionaries in 2013.

The Utah-based faith could also see an almost equal gender distribution among mis...

A 20-year-old Mormon man says he was turned down as a missionary candidate for opposing the LDS Church’s stance on gays during his pre-mission interviews.

He says he also was denied a temple recommend for his beliefs, according to the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

The man, identified only as Emmett C. in the Pacific Northwest, is straight but has an older brother and sister who are gay. Last year, the young man applied to serve a two-year mission for the Utah-based faith but told his LDS stake president (an ecclesiastical leader) that if asked about the issue as a missionary, he wo...

A U.S. tax court recently ruled that Mormon tithing is not a “necessary” expense, but rather a voluntary contribution.

That’s not, of course, how the petitioner, George Thompson, an LDS businessman and temple worker in Manhattan, sees it. Thompson argued that the tax court was taking away his religious freedom.

The legal exchange even included dueling Bible scriptures, with Thompson throwing out several verses in Malachi, which talk about “rob[bing]” God by not offering tithes, while the Internal Revenue Service responded with Jesus’ statement in Matthew to “render therefore to Caesar” tha...

If a pope is infallible, why can’t he do anything he wants — like do away with priestly celibacy?

Pope John Paul II, for example, altered the long-standing rule for electing a new pontiff from a two-thirds majority vote to a simple majority. Then Pope Benedict XVI changed it back.

But the presumption of a free-wheeling Holy Father misunderstands both infallibility and the office of the papacy.

“There are theological and logistical limits on the changes [the pope] can make,” writes Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “He can’t create new doctrine...

They’re back — Carl Bloch’s angel wings, that is.

The cover of this month’s New Era, the Mormon magazine for teens, shows the Danish artist’s “Gethsemane” in which a red-robed Jesus is cradled by an angel with wings rising above her shoulders.

It’s the latest exhibit in the on-again/off-again pattern with angels’ wings in LDS publications.

In some earlier uses of Bloch’s art by the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wings were removed.

But, in a 2010-11 exhibit of the Danish artist’s giant altar pa...

Pope Benedict XVI, the conservative pontiff who upended long-standing tradition by resigning, is bucking expectations again.

Instead of returning to a cardinal’s red or black robes and the title “bishop of Rome emeritus,” as many had speculated, Benedict has decided to keep his white cassock and title “pope” — though with emeritus appended.

He is, however, giving up his signature red shoes in favor of brown loafers.

“Benedict has said he will remain ‘hidden from the world’ in retirement,” Religion News Service reported. “The Vatican has said that he will...

There’s one pope candidate everyone might agree on: Yoda.

OK, the “Star Wars” guru is not really a candidate (fictional character, you know, and no evidence of being Catholic), but a figure like Yoda would transform the papacy, Religion News Service blogger Omid Safi argues.

Installing Yoda as the Holy Father would move the office from “an embodiment of authority to one that emphasizes spiritual transmission,” Safi writes, whose mission would be “to instruct, to awaken, to help his followers become who and what they are destined to be.”

Pope Yoda could shift the focus from one reli...

With the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, some Mormons began to speculate whether an LDS Church president could do the same.

Doug Gibson, writing in Ogden’s Standard-Examiner, argues that one already did so — in 1981.

That’s when LDS President Spencer W. Kimball, then age 86, “resigned” from his position, Gibson writes, calling a spry 71-year-old Gordon B. Hinckley as a “third counselor” in the governing First Presidency and relinquishing most of his responsibilities to the younger man.

What Kimball did was similar to the pope’s action, Gibson writes, j...

The just-announced results of a 2012 Gallup Poll of state-by-state religiosity has a familiar ring:

Mississippi is No. 1 and Utah is No. 2 — the same order as the previous year.

The Beehive State ended up with 56 percent of residents describing themselves as “very religious,” just short of Mississippi’s 58 percent.

As in 2011, eight of the top 10 religious states are in the South’s so-called Bible Belt. In fact, Utah — headquarters of the LDS Church — once again was the only Western state in the group.

Vermont came in...

Many Utah clergy and congregations are in the midst of celebrating Interfaith Month with an array of joint activities — just as a Lutheran minister in Newtown, Conn., is apologizing for his involvement in a similar event in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings.

The Rev. Rob Morris, pastor of Christ the King Lutheran Church, was reprimanded by his denomination for praying at a December vigil alongside other Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Baha’i clergy.

Such an interfaith appearance, apparently, is a no-no in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Religion News Service reported.

Peter M. Johnson has been named president of the Bessemer, Ala., LDS Stake, becoming the first black Mormon stake president in the state, according to The Birmingham News.

Johnson served a Mormon mission to Birmingham from 1987 to 1989, the newspaper reported, and had recently moved back to Alabama from Utah.

He is an Ernst and Young Fellow and assistant professor of accounting at the Culverhouse School of Accountancy at the University of Alabama.

Although Johnson is the first African-American to serve as a Mormon stake president in Alabama, he told the ...

U.S. Catholic bishops and four Reformed Christian denominations — Presbyterian Church-USA, the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the Reformed Church in America and the United Church of Christ — signed an agreement this week to recognize the validity of one another’s baptisms.

The Christian groups agreed, according to a news release, that the “formula for a valid baptism is that it include flowing water and be performed in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

While Catholic bishops in other countries have already made similar deals with Protestant communities, thi...

Mormon leaders are closing Benemerito de las Americas, an LDS Church-owned high school near Mexico City, and turning it into a Missionary Training Center (MTC).

The move was triggered by the massive influx of new missionaries after the Utah-based faith lowered the mission age for young men from 19 to 18 and for young women from 21 to 19. It is not yet clear what will happen with the small MTC that is adjacent to the Mexico City LDS Temple.

“Church leaders made the decision after considering every immediate alternative that could alleviate the demand at the church’s other missionary trainin...

To the Los Angeles Times, it is surprising that Marriott International would join the Human Rights Campaign’s coalition of companies calling for the repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

After all, writer David Colker reasoned, the giant hotel chain was founded by a devout Mormon, John Willard Marriott, and is still run by his son, Bill Marriott, also a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That Utah-based church pushed its members to support California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as only between a husband and wife.

What the story...

For many Christians, abortion is a conscious choice to kill a child whom God created. Their pro-life position is deeply religious, built on respect for the Almighty and his designs for humanity.

With the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion, are there abortion opponents who don’t believe in God?

Apparently so — and not just a few.

Kelsey Hazzard, a 24-year-old University of Miami alumna and recent graduate of the University of Virginia law school, has her doubts about deity, but she’s sure about the value of e...

Manti Te’o’s story of being duped by a fake girlfriend may seem unbelievable to many, but his Mormon bishop backs the Notre Dame football superstar.

Not only has Jim Carrier, bishop of the Notre Dame LDS Ward (congregation), met regularly with Te’o since last spring, but the Mormon leader also talked on the phone with the woman pretending to be Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua.

“I talked to Lennay many times,” Carrier told the South Bend Tribune. “Many times. On the phone. I would go over to [Te’o’s] house, and he’d say, ‘Hey Lennay, Bishop’s here. Do you want to talk to him?’ ”