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New WordPress LDS Scripture Linker Plugin for Bloggers

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Example of a popup using the new WordPress LDS Scripture Linker Plugin by DearScriptures.com

Example of a popup using the new WordPress LDS Scripture Linker Plugin by DearScriptures.com

For some time I’ve been using the excellent LDS Linker WordPress plugin, developed by Joey Day, to automatically link all scripture references on TempleStudy.com directly to the Church’s online scriptures at scriptures.lds.org.  It worked very well, and continues to be one of the most popular WordPress plugins for LDS bloggers to link their scripture references to the online scriptures.

Recently I was thinking how much easier it would be to just hover your mouse over a scripture reference and see a popup with the scripture reference written out.  It would make reading the scripture references that much quicker in a blog post, rather than clicking a link to another site.  [Read more…]

TempleStudy.com One Year Anniversary

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A Wordle created from all the text of TempleStudy.com posts in 2008. Click on the image to see a larger version. Created at http://www.wordle.net/

A Wordle created from all the text of TempleStudy.com posts in 2008. Click on the image to see a larger version. Made at http://www.wordle.net/

One year ago today I published my first post on TempleStudy.com, my first blog.  And it has been quite a year.  During 2008 I expanded my learning on the temple in leaps and bounds, and was able to share some of that with you as well as learn from you.  I met countless new people and made many new friends.  We shared new thoughts, interpretations, and discoveries with each other.  I attended for the first time several conferences and liveblogged them.  I’ve been humbled by your kindness and charity.  I was blessed to touch the lives of numerous people as you sent me emails expressing your thoughts and feelings.  You have touched me too, in multitudinous ways.  And the growth has been tremendous—nearly 100,000 people have visited the website from 170 countries around the world generating over 220,000 hits.  Over 500 people have subscribed by RSS feed, and another 254 have subscribed by email.  It’s been an amazing experience.  I hope your participation with me and our commenters has been fruitful for you, and has given you more insight into temple studies and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

To commemorate this anniversary of TempleStudy.com my dear wife was very kind and made a Wordle of all the posts from this past year.  For those of you who are not familiar with Wordles, it is an online tool that you can use to input text and generate a word collage with the most commonly used words shown larger, kind of like a tag cloud.  So you can see in this image where our focus was this past year.  Fun to see.  My wife printed out a copy and framed it for me to hang on our office wall.  She’s the best!

For those who are wondering where I’ve been the last month or so, I haven’t left.  The blogging has slowed down a bit.  I think I can blame some of that on our beautiful new baby boy that was born at the end of September.  He’s been a joy to our family, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  But it did shift my priorities a bit though, and gave me time to rethink things.  I will continue to blog about the temple, but it may not be as frequent.  I want to expand my learning into other areas, in addition to temples.  Not that TempleStudy.com will go too dormant, but I like the sentiments addressed by Sharon Otterman in her New York Times article on slow blogging.  Blogging is becoming a form of expression, and a channel of inquiry and thought, not a 140 character Twitter feed.

So while TempleStudy.com might not fill your daily appetite for news on the temple, hopefully the posts that are published here will be full of meaning.  I look forward to sharing new insights on the temple, and learning more from you throughout 2009.  Please feel free to send me your thoughts and findings.  I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for a wonderful year!

Listen to The Book of Mormon (and other books or blogs) from your Phone

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Do you ever find yourself away from a computer with a lot of time on your hands?  Maybe your eyes are just tired from reading too much from the computer screen.  Jott Networks has just recently introduced a new service called Jott Feeds that allows any RSS feed to be read to you over your phone.  It’s very simple:

  1. Sign up for a free account with Jott.
  2. Walk through the simple steps of adding an RSS feed to your Jott Feeds.
  3. Call the Jott number from your phone – 1-866-JOTT-123.
  4. When it asks “Who do you want to Jott?”  Say, “Jott Feeds.”
  5. When it asks “Which feed?” say the name of the feed that you assigned in step #2 (i.e. “Book of Mormon,” or “Temple Study”).
  6. In just a few seconds you will have the feed read to you over the phone by an excellent text-to-speech engine.
  7. To advance to the next post in the feed press 3.  To go back press 1.  To select another feed press 0.

I have added a TempleStudy.com Jott Feed badge in the right-hand sidebar for easily adding a Jott Feed of this site to your Jott account.  Now wherever you are at you can listen to TempleStudy.com with just your phone.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

The excellent thing about this service is that it works with any RSS feed.  This means that you could listen to any of the following from your phone from wherever you might be:

This works best with feeds that have full content, otherwise it will just read a summary.  Also, make sure you have plenty of minutes on your phone plan if you plan on using this very much, or use it during your unlimited off-peak hours.

Heavenly Ascents – A New Blog by David Larsen

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David J. LarsenOur long-time reader and commenter at TempleStudy, David J. Larsen, has begun a terrific blog – “Heavenly Ascents.” David received his BA from BYU in Near Eastern Studies in 2001, and is a current graduate student in Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, studying under Dr. Andrei Orlov who is a prominent Enoch scholar. David’s background includes Biblical studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Christian Studies, and Apocalyptic Literature. His language study has included Greek, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. In other words, he is well-qualified to speak on the topic he has chosen (but he’s still a non-authoritarian like the rest of us). The subject matter of his blog looks very interesting:

This blog . . . will cover a wide range of topics that have to do with theological/religious studies, based on what I am studying in school and other ventures into my own related interests. . . . Some of my research interests include Temple studies, Temple roots of early Christian beliefs, apocalyptic writings, intertestamental literature, and pseudepigrapha. . . .

It will focus on insights I learn in my graduate program in Theology at Marquette University and will include my reviews of books by authors such as Margaret Barker and other religious scholars of interest to LDS readers. ((Heavenly Ascents blog, and email communication June 2, 2008.))

Discussions such as these will be very helpful for Latter-day Saints and others to learn more about our religious traditions, and the symbolism and origin of our temple practices.

One of his first posts talks about the insights he’s gained from reading Margaret Barker’s recent book “Temple Themes in Christian Worship.”

To begin her study of “temple themes in Christian worship,” Barker begins by giving evidence that there was, in fact, a “secret tradition” of beliefs/practices that had its roots in the ancient Temple of Solomon. Many of the early Church Fathers knew of “authentic Christian traditions not recorded in the Bible” (p. 1). ((Insights from Margaret Barker’s “Temple Themes in Christian Worship”, Heavenly Ascents.))

Examples are given from early Church Fathers about the a tradition of unwritten, guarded, and secret practices or mysteries in the early Church, handed down from Christ to his apostles.

The New LDSJournal.com Service

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LDSJournal.com website

Every once and a while I discover things that I think are so relevant that I will share them here, even if they are not directly related to temples. The new LDSJournal.com website and service is one of those things. It stands out to me as something very useful and timely. (No, I wasn’t paid to post this.)

I saw an ad in an LDSLiving email about this website, and I was interested so I visited the site. I was immediately struck by how well put together the site is. The design and development of the site are top notch. It is rare these days to come across such a well-designed site, but congrats to the LDSJournal team for accomplishing the feat very well. I also appreciated the respectful use of quotes from the General Authorities on the subject of the importance of journaling, and other reasons why journaling might be beneficial to you spiritually, physically, and for your family history records on the “Why LDSJournal” page. [Read more…]