Recently in LDS places Category

It is always helpful to try and see yourself through someone else's eyes. So it's worthwhile to read a British journalist's account of attending an LDS Sunday meeting (a monthly testimony meeting, not the usual weekly sacrament meeting) at the Hyde Park Ward in London. It appears to be one in a series of similar visits to various denominations. The tone is balanced, although the journalist doesn't try very hard to hide his general disdain for religion. That's okay — I don't try very hard to hide my general disdain for journalists.

The new LDS temple in Draper, Utah is running a public open house from January 15 through March 14. For an entertaining account by a journalist who recently took the tour, read Robert Kirby's "What's so secret about temples?"

While in Salt Lake City this afternoon, I managed to fit in a visit to Temple Square for a couple of hours. It's always fun to visit the center place of Mormonism (which is a rather different category than "sacred ground" or "holy site"). I browsed through the South Visitors Center and its exhibits showing how massive granite blocks were hammered, drilled, and blasted out of Little Cottonwood Canyon, then transported twenty miles by wagon (later, railroad) to the site of the LDS temple. Just across the street, the Museum of Church History and Art has a temporary exhibit showing the details of the construction of the Tabernacle, which went through several architectural upgrades before attaining the fine sound quality offered by the rounded dome design.