A Mormon Woman's Reflections on Life and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Mormon Youth: Lights to the World

Dear Friends:

Here is a simple way you can really really help promote positive images of members online!

More Good Foundation, as you know, is working to provide honest seekers with correct information and accurate perceptions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members.  We have found that many of the public at large equate us either with the Amish, or with the polygamous groups that have recently been in the news.  In spite of the rise to stardom of many LDS people (David Archuleta, Chelsie Hightower, etc.) and the general knowledge that they are Mormon, people still aren’t figuring out who we are.  Because of this, we desire to add additional images to all the articles on all of our sites to show Mormons in action, going about our daily routines, jobs, church work, recreation, and milestone events. We’ve just created a site called LDSImages dot com where we will place these photos, so that those Googling Mormon images can find something positive that reflects our enjoyments, families, friends, activities rather than those that confuse our image with other religious groups.

This is a request that you will network with your own friends, even forward this message, so that we may gather in some great photos.  We need the images in jpg format, and you can email them to me at email@moregoodfoundation dot org. These can be pics of your own family, in your home or yard; photos of weddings, missionaries, humanitarian aid projects, groups of kids playing at games or sports, family home evenings, proms, seminary/institute gatherings, reunions, anything at all that shows who we are and how we look.  If you have a couple of paragraphs of content to go with the photo, it would be awesome. If not, send them anyway. If you send us a picture, that means we have your permission to use it.  Please include any info identifying the scene–”Joe and Lizzie Sikes upon their marriage at the Provo Temple, 4/08.” We will upload images without identifying individuals, with generic captions such as “Mormon family temple wedding,” or with first names only, so let us know your preference.  If you have images of Saints in other countries, we would also be very interested in using those permissible as well.

Whether amateur photographer, scrapbooker, or professional, we’d love your clean, crisp photos of Mormons in action.  If you are an artist who does charcoal or pencil drawings of Mormons, or who is willing to share any other images of members’ or Church-related images, please feel free to contribute.

By the way, if you are posting photos on Flickr, or other photo-sharing sites, and if you don’t have descriptions on them, friends of other faiths may not stumble upon them.  If you share them with us so we can add them to our repository with titles and descriptive post, they will make a difference in what is visible to those seeking to see who we are online.

Thanks so much for all your help. Please circulate this everywhere you can within the circles of your LDS community.

Well, I wonder where to post what when sometimes. So here are some random thoughts.

I’m excited about a new way those who are LDS can participate in sharing their family lives and hobbies online, in a way that helps friends of other faiths see portraits of us that are self-generated rather than generated by critics or dispassionate or disinterested third-party sources. Stay tuned.  Or email me about Adopt-a-Site.  We’ll make it official soon.

Kira is in cosmetology/hair program at MATC, learning lots, doing perms today. Thanks to Mindy for volunteering her two little girls for this.

Pew Study of Religion shows, unsurprisingly, that Mormons are exceedingly devoted, and that we are not in line with Hollywood-film-espoused values.  No shocker there.  What is interesting, though, is that 48 percent of the pop has no issue with the values perpetuated by the film industry.  From Willy Wanka to the dude/dudess in the bar of Shrek, to  Dumbledore in Harry Potter,  it’s hard to deny the in-breeding of liberal ideas aimed at having children see, be comfortable with, and embrace unknowingly almost, the androgenous, gay-like, transgender, out-of-the-natural-order combinations of creatures and set-up of constructed sexuality.  Well, a rant for another time.  I am trying to make a difference through legislation.  Share with me what you are doing in your families and in your community to stay this onslaught.

Talia has started PG ballroom camp, and loved her first day, though between that and our resistance workout yesterday, she was feeling it. Thank goodness for Glutamine.

Love to hear from anyone out there so I can have this be a more interactive cafe than a monologue or diatribe.

I’ll post photos of some of Kira’s do’s and Talia’s dancing sometime soon.

Okay, so I’ve read the articles, including this one: LDS May Have Posthumously Baptized Obama’s Ancestors, and wondered who stumbled upon or who was staked out to surreptitiously seek out controversy about the long-standing Christian practice (mentioned by Paul in the New Testament) to be baptized by proxy for those who have gone before who lacked the opportunity on earth–as Mormons continue to do today.  I read a bit and then learned that it was Helen Radkey who had done the digging, as she had done previously in regard to Jewish descendants.

So Dear Helen:  

This is to you  ( and all of my friends can join in). I’ve tried to come to some level of understanding about who you are and what you are about.  I’ve read your website, bio, and listened to you on talk radio. I understand that you are an internationally known genealogist and respect that accomplishment.

I want to first share some sentiments you expressed on your site that we have in common.  We appreciate our ancestors and the joy in researching about them, learning who they are and their connection with our own identity.  In your own words on your site:

We get to learn who they were, where and how they lived. It is important to honor and respect them, no matter what skeletons we may find in the closet. We are new growth from an old tree. Our ancestors are all part of the river of bloodlines we are descended from. They represent our unbroken, ancestral heritage. Our ancestry is part of our divine inheritance, and should always be treated with acceptance on our part. Spirit can help us understand how our ancestry contributes to our personal characteristics. Understanding our ancestors can help us understand ourselves. (more…)

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Mormon Youth: Sweethearts' Dance

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