Tag Archives: Mormon

The voice of God

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When I first saw the video of the now homeless and former radio announcer, Ted Williams, I was struck by his self-described “God Given Gift of Voice.”

Some have described his rich baritone voice as “the voice of God.” Having never personally heard God speak aloud, I cannot say for certain if this is indeed true.

What rings true for me, however, is how his story has given God a voice in a world that often shuts him out in the name of political correctness. Helping other people…isn’t that part of His message?

And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.

Mosiah 2: 17

On my way home from work, I often pass people like Ted Williams…standing on the street corner…begging for work or food. These people do not possess Williams’ rich baritone voice. But they do possess the same basic need for food and shelter.

The scriptures–the word of God–speak plainly to us on how we should treat the poor among us. You have perhaps heard the angelic voice of Ted Williams…but will you listen to the voice of God?

An Outline of the New Testament

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[Cross Posted from Sixteen Small Stones]

It’s been nearly a year since I posted the outline of the Old Testament that had come about through my work with Daniel Bartholomew on our open source ScriptureLog project. We had previously released an outline of the textual structure of the Book of Mormon, and I had intended to move on immediately to making the New Testament available for ScriptureLog and to produce an accompanying outline for it.

However, other projects and responsibilities soon pushed the New Testament work to the back-burner.

With the adult Sunday school curriculum in the LDS church shifting to study the New Testament during 2011, I made an extra effort to get something finished by the end of 2010.

While the update to add the New Testament to the Scripturelog plugin for WordPress might not be available for another week or two,  the outline of the New Testament is available for download immediately in PDF format so it can be used and printed by anyone:

An Outline of the New Testament

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For Good and Evil: Joseph Smith and Google’s Book Ngram Viewer

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[Cross posted from Sixteen Small Stones]

You may have heard about the cool new Book Ngram Viewer from Google Labs. The result of a joint effort by Harvard University, some traditional book publishers, and Google Books, the project uses a sample of 5 million books published between 1500 and the present to identify word and phrase frequencies relative to the number of words published each year. They call these phrase frequencies Ngrams.

While the sample size only represents 4% of books ever published, and the approach is often limited by the complexity of language usage, the project offers a fascinating (not to mention fun!) look not just into language, but into comparative cultural trends, historical events, fads, celebrity, and influence.

And best of all, Google has provided a free web-based interface so that anyone can play around with Ngram searches.

For instance, the Ngram Viewer can be used to compare the usage of the terms Mormon vs LDS:

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Missionary Moment: An open door policy

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Sunday morning my wife answered a knock at the door; being the fifth Sunday of the month, we were not expecting anyone to come to the house. She called for me to come to the door.

I was in the middle of helping my son write a talk for Primary he was scheduled to give that afternoon. The topic of the talk: The mission of the Church is to invite all to come unto Christ.

When I opened the door, I saw a pair of  missionaries from another church.

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