Tzedakah is different than charity. Charity comes from the word charitus, which means heart. Tzedakah comes from the word tzedek, which means justice, so when you are giving tzedakah, you are not just making the world a better place by contributing t...
Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too a...
Everything I’d fought for, every challenge, every victory … all of it was empty if anything happened to him. Without him, I wouldn’t have had the courage to become the person I was. Without him, I wouldn’t have realized what it truly was to l...
Doubt has become the veritable wellspring of my creative process and my philosophic explorations. It has equipped me with the temerity and wherewithal to question certain truths deemed ‘fundamental’ by my betters. Defiance has made me stubborn—...
When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become...
It is becoming fashionable to scorn the idea of sin in society. The impact of humanistic thinking is to belittle the concept that man is corrupt. Psychologists and psychiatrists would persuade us that people really are not responsible for their wrong...
All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, w...
I told you that 'juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. 'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer t...
The choice for devoted Latter-day Saint women is not just to simply go forward and try to be happy and create a fulfilling life. As women of covenant our goal is to go forward and develop stron testimonies and nurturing and caring hearts that will pr...
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the questio...
Marriage is a million piece puzzle; a pristine and exciting pursuit at the beginning that gradually becomes a daunting task, usually more challenging than anticipated. It is only those truly committed to solving that puzzle who witness in the end ...
We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did—a reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor.
It makes a world of difference to know that God loved you enough to send His only begotten Son to suffer and die for you. Suddenly our lives and sufferings aren't meanigless accident, but part of God's loving plan for us. And our acceptance of that p...
compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be a...
I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel....
Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in ...
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay atte...
Church has believed that parents probably wont' assume responsibility for their own children's growth, so they have tried to become a parent substitute. This in turn ha s fostered parents to adopt a "drop-off" mentality. Maybe the greatest gift a chu...
From the time they hit middle school, they start moving away from home. They are not doing anything wrong; it's just the way they are made. They are becoming independent, and they begin redefining themselves through the eyes other people who are not ...
Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanic...
Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we´re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself fr...
