The Cricket and Seagull Fireside Chat

It was Brigham Young himself who said, "The Mormon Battalion will be held in honorable remembrance to the latest generation," and the newly refurbished and renamed Mormon Battalion Historic Site in Old Town San Diego is bound to keep that remembering alive for years to come.

Elder Evans, the current site Director, gives us an overview of the miracles of the Mormon Battalion and how the new site has become an integral part of historic Old Town for area 4th graders, and Sister Evans shows us the activites children and adults will experience when they visit this new state-of-the-art mixture of history and technology; talking pictures, movies, panning for gold, and feeling the earth shake during a stampede are just some of the exciting elements.  While you listen, why not Click Here to visit the website at http://historicmormonbattalion.net and explore?

That's this week on The Cricket and Seagull...

A Musical Christmas Card for 2010

The story this week isn't breaking news even though it's good news. In fact, old or new don't really apply--it's timeless. I hope you'll have a quiet moment to relax and listen to The Christmas Story read from the New Testament, interwoven with timeless Christmas music.

It's read by my neighbor, Myron Hassard, affectionately known as "Haz" by all the people in our ward, who think of him as our ward Grandpa.

That's this week on The Cricket and Seagull...

In this engaging new book, author and historian Paul Thomas Smith has created my Christmas pick of the year--a text that is comfortingly familiar, yet filled with the bits of history and insight a life-long scholar can add to the narrative to make it vivid and alive in our minds and hearts; a book families and students of the scriptures can enjoy for years to come.  And the illustrations drawn from the religious paintings of Carl Bloch are the perfect accompaniment to the text throughout.

Why were shepherds despised in New Testament times?  Was there really no rooster that crowed three times for Peter?  Was Luke wrong about the census?  Listen as the author discusses all of this and more.

That's this week on The Cricket and Seagull...

It's been years in the making, but Dawn Pheysey, Curator of Religious Art for the BYU Museum of Art, can still hardly believe they are all displayed here together for the first time in history; five of the eight huge Carl Bloch masterpieces which have graced churches across Denmark and Sweden for over a hundred years.

In this walk-through of the exhibit we'll hear the history of the pieces, learn about the other Bloch paintings and etchings in the show which have been beloved by Latter-day Saints for half a century, and try to answer the question Danish priests have asked for years, "What is it the Utah Mormons see in these paintings?"  

That's this week on The Cricket and Seagull...

If you've ever had a New Year's Eve where all you wanted to do was warm up some enchiladas for dinner and then go to bed, then you can relate to Beth, the protagonist of "Promise Me."  After a year when tragedy seems to have moved in as a permanent companion, an unusual meeting at a 7-Eleven starts a whole new relationship that will change everything in her life and present her with a choice she never could have imagined.

With 16 books in a row on the New York Times Best Seller lists, you could either play it safe and stick to a formula, or you could do what author Richard Paul Evans has done and take the risk of giving your readers something new and unexpected.  The fact that "Promise Me" is currently number four on the Best-seller list seems to show it was a risk worth taking.

That's this week on The Cricket and Seagull...