Quotes of the week
Blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, and though a late, a sure reward succeeds.
~William Congreve~
Meditation of the week
Burgundy Heart-shaped medallion
Author of the Week
It's the birthday of the poet T.S. Eliot, (books by this author) born Thomas Stearns Eliot in St. Louis (1888).
It was this young Eliot, traveling around Europe as a college student, who wrote a poem about a middle-aged man, full of poignant lines about growing older, with the line, "I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." That poem was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," published in Poetry magazine when Eliot was 26.
Video of the week
The unseen sea
The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.
You can’t make up such a thing as that, I dare you to even try
It was on September 21st in 1823 that Joseph Smith Jr. (books by this author) claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni, who told him how to find golden plates that contained the text of the Book of Mormon. Joseph was visited five separate times during the night and early morning, in his family's log cabin home near Palmyra, New York. He wrote later: "While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor. He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness."
Moroni explained to Smith that there were golden plates located near his cabin that contained the true Gospel, which had been told "by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants." The angel himself was one of these ancient inhabitants, who had been brought by God to the Americas from Jerusalem, about 600 years before the birth of Jesus.
Four years after he was first visited by Moroni, in 1827, Joseph Smith was allowed to take the golden plates and translate them for the world. He called the language that they were written in "reformed Egyptian," which he claimed was the language that had evolved from Hebrew among those people whom God had brought to America.
In order to translate from this "reformed Egyptian," Smith used stones he called "seer stones." He finished his translation by 1829, then according to Smith, Moroni took the plates back. From the translation he published The Book of Mormon in March of 1830, at which point Joseph Smith Jr. was just 24 years old. A month later, Smith was starting up the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
