Last night Brandon Flowers was in Philadelphia, so there too was I. This was a solo show, not the Killers, and more intimate, a couple thousand happy people in an 80 by 170-foot room, which happens to be a mile east of the Philadelphia temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which latter structure I highly recommend to anyone with a chance of visiting. Two weeks ago I thought my four tickets would be used by myself, my wife, my teen-aged daughter, and a boy the daughter invited. Then, the naming and blessing of my wife’s new grandchild was scheduled for the day before and 30 miles west of the concert venue. That drew in a daughter and a granddaughter from the Mountain West for a few days, and I lost my date to the Monday night show.
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The Ancient City, by de Coulanges, was one of those rare books where reading it is more of an experience than a receipt of information.  It is as if I dreamed the book.

One thing I got from it that struck me very powerfully, and still does now that I am ‘awake,’ is the sense of physicality associated with the ancestors.  Unlike with other pagan beliefs, it would be impious to cremate your ancestors’ remains.   There is some real truth to this; it wasn’t until recently that we allowed cremations; in common with the Christian tradition, we used to ban them.  There is still a sense that the physical remains have some special connection to the person, which is why we dedicate the graves and Joseph Smith taught resurrection at the site of burial.

In a certain sense, the Ancient Religion just was tending to graves, and there is a lot we can take from that.    That is as much family history as searching out names online.  Perhaps more so.  So too the care and transmission of family antiquities.

When the ancients left to found a new city, they would take soil from atop their ancestors’ graves with them to commingle in their new earth.  This is a powerful thing to do.

I caught a vision this morning of what God intended for me and my wife when we were younger if we had both been the best versions of ourselves we could have been.  We could have been very great together.

In the Narnia series Aslan sometimes tells people something I like ‘I don’t tell people what could have been,’ but that hasn’t been my experience, at least not this morning.  The Spirit put me in the inside feeling a ‘what could have been.’

There’s a reason for it.  Not because its recapturable.  That particular glory is gone with its time.  Its to let me know that there are probably things ahead of me, and things right now, that I can reach for if only I would.

This is a book I would highly recommend to any Latter-day Saint of active mind.

Particularly the first 90 pages, where de Coulanges spells out his vision of the what the Ancient Religion was.

Sealings, lineage, posterity, eternal family, priesthood, patriarchal descent, the home as a temple, the potential sacredness of graves, even some of what Joseph Smith was trying to do with ‘inheritances in Zion’–it’s all there.

You read with reverence and recognition.

This is the dispensation of the fullness of times.

In a recent tour of the model temple at the Temple Square Visitor Center, a missionary told us in the model sealing room what a 70 had told him.  “When you stand between the two sets of mirrors, the lines of figures you see in both directions represent your ancestors and your posterity.  You are the sacred link between them.”

This is a line that could have been found anywhere in de Coulanges book.

Some have said, with some justice, that Come Follow Me dumbs down the gospel.  It’s not just that we eschew the speculative stuff, its that everything gets reduced to Christ caring about you personally, which large swathes of the Old Testament, for example, are NOT about.   The new schedule would seem to make this problem worse.

But while I think there is some justice to the complaint, as a Sunday School teacher I have decided to lean in.  What we did this Sunday, pretty successfully, was what I would call ‘scripture-guided testimony.’  I encouraged people to share scriptures or passages from the reading that they had felt testified to when reading it, with no further comment necessary.  A simple ‘and I believe this’ if needed.  Some people didn’t limit themselves to that, but it worked well.  A transcript would have been banal but in person the Spirit was there.

One curious thing–I have noticed it before-was how the same little verse will sometimes have stood out to more than one of our congregants.

On Sunday it was Proverbs 22:13

The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.

Parental influences have also been diluted by the way in which most current members of the Church earn a living. In times past, one of the great influences that unified families was the experience of struggling together in pursuit of a common goal—such as taming the wilderness or earning a living. The family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which do not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation.

Pres. Dallin Oaks, Oct. 2025

I wonder if the Saints, myself included, are taking this seriously enough. What would taking this more seriously look like?

Lately, I have felt a push to stand more independently, to have my own income stream. I have had an idea for a business in my mind for years, but now I feel a renewed push to make it happen. I have made more progress on this in the last few months, than I have any other time I worked on this idea.

We all know, there is no strict line separating the Temporal from the Spiritual. (D&C 29:34-35) Business can be just as spiritual as working in our garden. Or as spiritual as Adam and Even working in their Garden.

Self-Reliance is as much a Spiritual principle with spiritual blessings, as it is a Temporal economic one. What would it take to make your family a “unit of economic production”? It does not have to start big. For instance, Pres Oaks talks about having a family garden.

There are two reasons for us to focus on Self-Reliance and to take it more seriously than we have been.

First, because the Prophet and Scriptures have spoken about it. For example:

That through my providence, notwithstanding the tribulation which shall descend upon you, that the church may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world; D&C 78:14

There are other verses we could quote as well. But there are spiritual aspects to this that are significant. They are blessings we will need.

Second, also because the impact of AI. AI has not yet had a huge effect on jobs, but it will. As I have argued many times, Isaiah 19 records something just like this – mass unemployment and people mourning because of it. The economy will be turned upside down. I think it is almost certain that this disruption will be on a scale far greater than the Great Depression. Much intellectual labor will become like the forklift in a warehouse – useful, important and powerful but also just a common, everyday piece of equipment. It becomes a tool like any other.

A LOT of people will lose their jobs in the upheaval. But, the converse is also true. A LOT of people are going to get rich. Some will get crazy rich. The same tech that enables a CEO to run a company without a workforce, or a minimal one, enables you just as well.

Read that again and burn it into your mind.  The same tech, be that AI, Robotics or whatever else, that enables companies to not need you, also enables you to not need them. And frankly, I think you would handle the money better than they would. The same reason they could get rid of employees, enables you to manage a virtual workforce as well.

Of course, this does not eliminate the need for capital, judgement, customers, reputation or hard work and all the minutia of running a small business. But what it does do is vastly and radically reduce the amount of labor and specialized expertise needed to build something useful. This is more easily doable at this exact moment in history, than at any other time. In my opinion, 2026-2027 may be the peak time to act, the best time to start. The productive power available to an individual relative to the possibilities is rapidly increasing.

Is AI ready to do everything yet, or replace everyone this week? No, certainly not. But one does not stand on the tracks looking at an approaching train, just because it hasn’t hit you yet.

I think it would startle you just how good AI is getting. I say this, because it even startles people who have been in it a long time. It just solved one of the greatest problems in mathematics. (Allegedly)  Ignore the other drama around it, for the moment. It just solved a puzzle that has perplexed the best mathematicians for over a hundred years. There have been other mathematical problems solved as well. If it can do this, it can help you solve problems as well. The problems you can solve are only limited by your initiative, imagination and the Spirit of the Lord. Not to negate the importance of things like capital, but the crucial lever is faith as both a spiritual and temporal principle of power, and revelation. God can open the way, but only if we act.

I think it is time for the Saints to stand more independently, economically. I am not speaking this by authority, but only by the feeling in my heart, and what my own eyes can see. I feel are approaching a hinge point in history. Tremendous problems, and extreme persecution, but also extreme potential to grow both spiritually, and materially. And we are going to need both. The Lord will save his people, but we need to act in faith.

I would encourage all of you, to earnestly consider, and to pray you and your families, whether you should be building an income stream, productive skill, family enterprise, or other form of economic independence outside your primary employment. I sincerely suspect, that for many the answer is yes.

For two centuries, industrialization and economies of scale have steadily pulled production out of the household and into factories, corporations, and offices. Husbands, wives, and children increasingly became participants in separate economic systems rather than members of a common productive one.

AI, robotics, distributed manufacturing, online markets, and cheap automation may now be pushing in the opposite direction. For the first time in generations, a household may be able to command tools, expertise, productive capacity, and access to markets that previously required an entire company.

That does not mean we should recreate the farm economy of the nineteenth century. It may mean something much more interesting: recovering the family as a productive unit, but at a technological level our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

President Oaks pointed to what was lost when the family ceased to be a unit of economic production. Perhaps one of the opportunities of our moment is to recover and restore what was lost.

So I would ask the question seriously: What could your family build together?

Perhaps it is a business. Perhaps it is a garden, a trade, an investment, a cottage industry, intellectual property, a family enterprise, or something we have not yet learned to imagine.

The point is not merely to make more money. It is to become more capable, more productive, more united, and more independent—to become a family that can act rather than merely consume.

We now have tools that make that possibility unusually real. I think we should use them.

September 11, 2001. 25 years have passed—25 more nails in the cross—but we remember. (more…)

Charlie Kirk was murdered one year ago today.  I drove by UVU for the first time in a couple of days a couple of days ago. I was surprisingly affected by it. The transsexual Antifa milieu that encouraged his assassination and may have been more heavily involved than just encouragement has had nothing happen to them and it seems unlikely they ever will.

I had an extremely peculiar thing happen to me a couple of days ago. Although it was meaningless in itself, it had deep spiritual significance and an interesting lesson.

We were visiting some family and we get up earlier than most so we have had an hour or so in the morning where we are just quietly dinking. A son had found two dice and was rolling them. He got a double and crowed softly, “A double!” He rolled some more and got another double. “Two doubles!” Just to mess with him I said it didn’t count because it was his second double and he had rolled two threes. Then he got his next double and it was two twos so I told him that didn’t count either.

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A lot of guys want to be intimate before there is intimacy, romantic before there is romance, peace before victory

Cryptic entries from my notebook. The meaning is lost in time.

* The most important part about the temple is the home

* Joe Blow, by his lights, turns on the charm

* The right wing needs more thought terminating cliches

* Story: procrastinating hero

There is no context. You have here the sum total of each entry.

The strength of youth is is trying to do things you don’t know how to do.  We call it ‘potential,’ but that it what it comes down to.

We are all of us young, in that sense.  The advantage the actual youth have is that they know it.

The new youth program rollout was today.  One could quibble about aspects of it.  There was the cringe trend of always naming girls first and putting boys second.  There was the description of mission and then family as if it were standard for all, not just the young men.  But  there was a great deal of good and above all there was the wonderful phrase, “focus on future family.”  Wonderful.  More please!

On the sweetness of Mormon life

You are walking your wife down the hall at church.  She is ill and is holding on to you.  Her footsteps are small and hobbled.

“I feel like I am a spectacle,” she says.

What she is is faith in every footstep.

Two weeks ago my brother-in-law invited me to a concert. Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The rest of our families were doing other things on a Friday night, so it was just him and me. I asked my wife, who is from New Hampshire, if she knew this place in western Massachusetts I’d been invited to. “Of course,” was the response, so I knew it was well-known in the region, at least among people who think a lot about music. Physically the place was lovely: dozens of acres of lightly-trod grass parking, and the “music shed” a roofed, open-walled, 90-year-old structure with seating for thousands surrounded by more grass for picnic blankets and camp chairs. Similar to the much younger Wolf Trap in Washington DC’s Virginia suburbs. Earlier rains diminished attendance on the grass; we arrived not many minutes before the program began and set up our chairs in a fine spot near center-front.

My brother-in-law looked at the printed program. “There will be ballet dancers.” That turned a wheel in my memory. That’s right: Appalachian Spring was originally composed as a ballet. I had never seen it performed that way, only as an orchestral performance. I enjoy dance immensely, so this would be a special treat. (more…)