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MILLCREEK, Utah, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Utah Senate Majority Leader Sheldon Killpack was booked into a county jail Friday, suspected of drunken driving, police said. The 41-year-old Republican was pulled over about 12:15 a.m. by a state highway patrol officer who allegedly noticed "a poor driving pattern," the Deseret News reported. Police said he failed a field sobriety test and then refused to breathe into a portable breath tester, the newspaper said. "I could smell the odor of alcohol coming from the subject's breath," a trooper wrote in a probable cause statement. Killpack issued a statement in which he said...

PROVO, Utah -- Hugh Nibley, one of the greatest defenders of Joseph Smith's work, didn't worry about vindicating the Prophet's character, said Richard L. Bushman at a lecture at BYU on Jan. 14. Instead, Nibley concentrated on shifting the debate to what Joseph had produced: the Book of Mormon. Bushman, the Howard W. Hunter Professor of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University (Calif.), was the inaugural speaker of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute's weekly lecture series honoring the centennial of the late professor Hugh W. Nibley's birth. Bushman looked at how Nibley "approached the Prophet from a strangely oblique angle."...

Most of us Mormons, if we are long-timers in the church, have heard that the “Constitution will hang by a thread” in the last days and that the LDS prophet, or church leadership, will save the United States from destruction. This all comes from the “White Horse prophecy,” a bit of Mormon lore, where two devout followers, Edwin Rushton and Theodore Turley, apparently had a conversation with the prophet Joseph Smith. A “transcript” of Smith’s part of the conversation, 10-plus years later, ended up in Paradise, Utah’s John J. Robert’s private journal. I have to admit, growing up, I thought...

Bouncing around on the trend-tossed seas of 21st-century book publishing, Mormon scholarship seems to have docked at the granddaddy of all prestigious presses: Oxford University. By all accounts, the unlikely partnership between the oldest university in the English-speaking world and an upstart American faith seems to be working. Mormon writers, particularly historians, get the academic credibility they crave and Oxford sells a lot of books. Two years ago, Oxford University Press published Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, three LDS Church scholars. The harrowing account of the 1857 slaughter of...

VANCOUVER, B.C. (CN) - After its lengthy but unsuccessful bid to prosecute polygamists in Bountiful, the British Columbia government faces a lawsuit from Winston Blackmore, alleging unlawful prosecution of the embattled leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The state's charges were tossed by the British Columbia Supreme Court. Blackmore claims he suffered financial and business losses while defending himself, and that the charges were laid after the province's attorney general shopped around for a special prosecutor who would recommend charges despite the uncertain constitutional status of Canada's polygamy laws. After two special prosecutors declined to...

Islamic Relief USA officials announced Wednesday they were flying $1 million of aid to Haiti in cooperation with the LDS Church.

The Mormon Church has changed some of its most sacred rituals, eliminating parts of the largely secret ceremonies that have been viewed as offensive to women and to members of some other faiths...... All the recent modifications were made in the ''endowment'' ceremony, a ritual considered essential to assure Mormons of life after death. Mormons participate in the rite only once on their own behalf, usually as young adults who are about to do missionary work or be married. But they may repeat the ritual any number of times on behalf of their ancestors. Participants follow a dramatic reenactment, once...

Utah, where most surveys show just more than two-thirds of the residents are Latter-day Saints, is the 12th most religious state in the United States. Utah takes a back seat to 11 Southern states, most in the Bible Belt. According to a new analysis released by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life, the most religious states are Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky. The rankings were based on a question about how important religion was in people's lives taken during a 2007 Religious Landscape Survey. States where religion is least important...

Hideous. That was the one word a pastor used to describe Mormonism to me the day I sat with him to give pointers on how he could counsel a brand new Christian who happened to also be a third generation Mormon. It’s easy enough for those of us who work in Mormon ministries to become immune to the day to day blasphemous teachings of the LDS Church. So when someone comes along that is unfamiliar with the nuances and outrageous theology, it always gives us a fresh take on the scenario. There are many other books written by reputable pastors...

POCATELLO — One of the organizers of a media campaign that is using billboards in Pocatello and other cities seeking to convince Mormons of perceived errors in their faith says the group is not attacking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "The reason we do this is that we really do have a love for the Mormon people,” says Mark Cares, president of the group that is organizing the campaign. “Our ministry is to reach out to the LDS people.” He says while the campaign does question LDS doctrine, it is not meant to attack Mormons....

IDAHO FALLS -- Rex Rammell has had a change of heart regarding who is invited to his "elders of Israel only" meetings. At a press conference Thursday, the Idaho gubernatorial candidate issued a formal apology with regards to his exclusion of non-Mormons from his upcoming meetings dealing with the so-called "White Horse Prophecy." Reading from a prepared statement, Rammell said he was wrong to assume that nonmembers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wouldn't be interested in hearing his message. "To all those citizens who are not members of the LDS faith, who have expressed a sincere...

WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid apologized on Saturday for saying the race of Barack Obama — whom he described as a "light skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one" — would help rather than hurt his eventual presidential bid. Obama quickly accepted, saying "As far as I am concerned, the book is closed." Reid, facing a tough re-election bid this year, spent the day telephoning civil rights leaders and fellow Democrats in hopes of mitigating the political damage. The revelations about Reid's 2008 comments were included in the book "Game Change" by Time...

The Romneys appeared recently on Fox TV's "Fox and Friends" in a two-part taped interview. Ann talked about her battle with cancer and Mitt talked about his political future and whether being Mormon is a political liability. Excerpts of the interview with Gretchen Carlson: SNIP CARLSON: And so while you're writing your book, are you also thinking in your head: "Hmm. This is something I might want to do again in my life -- run for president"? MITT ROMNEY: You know, you really don't think about that until the time comes when you need to make a decision. It's always...

If you had happened into the Cannon House Office Building on Washington DC’s Capitol Hill a few days before Christmas, you would have heard something amazing and most unusual. There, echoing down the halls and reverberating up the marbled stairs of the rotunda, wafting into the offices...were the booming voices of missionaries, singing at the top of their lungs... SNIP ...President and Sister Mark and Karyn Albright held their Christmas gathering this year in this House office building and, instead of having an inspirational speaker or two, the LDS members of Congress came to address the missionaries and bear their...

"...G. Vance Smith, a committed Mormon, now leads the Society. Vance Smith is systematically removing people from leadership positions within the John Birch Society and replacing them with Mormons. One gathers that Smith does not feel that he is accountable to the membership concerning his reasons for the replacement of longtime leadership. There seems to be no accountability factor. Longtime Birchers are leaving the Society en masse. There seems to be a major concern that the Society is fast becoming a puppet for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One document that I received suggests that Smith's course...

Idaho gubernatorial candidate Rex Rammell's call for a meeting of Mormon elders to discuss the so-called "White Horse Prophecy" attributed by some people to church founder Joseph Smith has gained national attention. As a result of media criticism that the meeting would include only members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Rammell has decided to open that meeting, as well as others in east Idaho, to everyone. After the story was picked up by Drudge Report on Tuesday, Rammell spent much of the day fielding requests for interviews from national media organizations, including MSNBC. The Drudge Report...

Truman Madsen was amazed at the outburst. Madsen was at a Harvard seminar on the great Catholic thinker, Saint Augustine. As the graduate students were discussing the Creation, Madsen presented the Mormon idea that "man's intelligence was unoriginated and indestructible." "The entire class was violent in its outbursts," Madsen later wrote. "For some minutes the professor's anxiety to keep the peace was futile." Madsen, who died last year, wrote about this encounter in his 1966 book "Eternal Man." But the idea that caused the academic explosion wasn't Madsen's. "Regarding the ultimate identity of man, the Prophet Joseph Smith taught that...

Inside every LDS columnist is a frustrated theologian trying to get out. And thanks to a gift book from my sister-in-law, today I let the fellow have his say. Let's begin with this: Over the years, Stephen E. Robinson's "Parable of the Bicycle" has become almost as well-known in Mormon circles as the recipe for s'mores. It tells how a young girl wants a bicycle but doesn't have enough money for it. So her father tells her to put in what she can, and he'll make up the difference. As it turns out, she puts in a pittance compared to...

Idaho GOP gubernatorial candidate Rammell expands on controversial prophecy in YouTube video Click for video     -SNIP-  Rammell says he has invited about 100 Mormon men to a Jan. 19 meeting in Idaho Falls to discuss the "White Horse Prophecy," which some attribute to Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith. The prophecy, which is not embraced by top Latter-day Saints Church officials, holds that the Constitution "will hang ... by a single thread" and LDS leaders will step forward to preserve it. -SNIP- In the video, Rammell defends his decision to meet only with Mormon men, because he wants...

... A new Web site pitching itself as a Mormon myth-buster recently launched, causing me once again to wonder about why we Latter-day Saints take so much joy in spreading unsubstantiated stories about ourselves. The site, HolyFetch.com, is run by Casey Cummings, a resident of Kaysville, Utah, who says he got interested in the world of Mormon myths when he was on his mission in Austria. The site's basic format is similar to that of sites like snopes.com. People submit popular Mormon myths, and then Cummings investigates them and deems them either "true" or "false." I'm frankly surprised that something...