1847 Poem : Theology or Sci Fi?

" Jehovah Creating the Earth"

       by Walter Rane

My son, Doug, sent me this great poem.  Enjoy Christ in the Universe

By Alice Meynell  (b. 1847)

WITH this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
But not a star of all	5
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.
Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,	10
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,	15
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.	20
But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
O, be prepared, my soul!	25
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man. Nicholson & Lee, eds.  The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917. You can find this poem and many others HERE.

More about NEW English LDS Scriptures

A good description of ALL the changes made and the rational behind them is available in an excellent article by John Lynch in Meridan Magazine HERE.
A 35 page PDF is also available for you to download detailing each change made. You will need Adobe to be able to download it.

New English LDS Scriptures

The Church has announced a new 2013 edition of the LDS Scriptures in English.  
The print versions - for now only available in black or brown leather covers - will be available this summer, but the you can view or download the new digital versions here.

[The iPod digital version is currently NOT downloading : maybe try in a few days]

Spellings have been standardized and updated.  Mistakes corrected. New information is presented in the historical headings of the Doctrine and Covenants sections.  

The greatest number of changes are in the Study Helps.  Two of my favorite sections, the CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES  and the HARMONY OF THE GOSPELS are now separate, stand-alone sections.  There are some wonderful new photos with much more elaborate explanations.

Go and enjoy yourself!!!

I Recommend Robert Norman's Blog, "CONTEMPLATIONS"

About 30 years ago, my brother started sending me notes from an institute class he was taking in Tucson AZ.  The teacher was Robert Norman.  Reading those notes became the institute class I attended.  I began studying Hebrew and learning to love the God of the Old Testament because of how Brother Norman taught.  
Robert Norman has an excellent blog online:  Contemplations : Things to Ponder.
Go back in his archived posts and read them in order of posting.
If you read one post a week and study what he is teaching, you will create a great way to do your scripture study.

Talmud Scholar to Speak in Salt Lake

From Daniel Peterson's blog : 

One of the preeminent authorities in the world on the Talmud, the Jewish “oral Torah,” will be speaking at the University of Utah next week.

For details, see  http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/category/other-news/ .

 At the small dinner that some of us attended for Royal Skousen before his Tuesday night lecture, Professor Grant Hardy, of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, passed on an amusing old Jewish observation that he had gleaned by way of Moshe Halbertal.  It ran along these lines:

 Hell, it turns out, is not a place of flames and torturing devils.  Heaven is not a place of fluffy clouds and endless pleasure.  At the judgment, God will assemble the souls of all the dead into one vast hall.  There, he will pass out copies of the Talmud, which every soul will be invited to study.  For the wicked, such study will be hell.  For the righteous, it will be heavenly bliss.

LDS Church Disaster Relief 2012

The Church responded to more than disasters worldwide during the past year.  You can read about the response here in the LDS Newsroom.

Most of the emergency disaster service given in the Europe Area was due to severe weather.

Navigating Mormon History: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

My son, Steve,

 recommended this blogpost by his friend Nate (here)

 quoting from an article by Dan Peterson (here).

I recommend "Mormon Interpreter" as a good blog to read and think about.