Some of our readers are observing Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of Av, the day that marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples. On this day, Jews fast and read from the book of Lamentations:
4:2 The precious children of Zion
Once valued as gold
Alas they are accounted as earthen pots
Work of a potter’s hands!
How many times have [...]

In a column detailing how we piled on debt from 2004-2008, Ralph R. Mabey in the Mormon Times has a good line to help us focus our future priorities:
In Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin’s words, we unwisely based our spending much more on our “yearnings” than our “earnings.”

Now a fourth Obama administration nominee with tax troubles.
This time, it’s Ron Kirk, the president’s choice to be U.S. trade representative. Kirk owes an estimated $10,000 in back taxes from earlier in the decade and has agreed to pay them, the Senate Finance Committee said Monday.
Remember this good lesson for public officials from Abraham in Genesis: even [...]

Column worth reading by Kristine Frederickson in the Mormon Times on the perils of conspicuous consumption and how now necessity ”has engendered thrift, industry and charitable impulses and actions” prompting a new recognition of the difference between wants and needs, teaching us “to live well on less.”
She says that in 1869 Brigham Young:
…explained that others looked at the [...]

So much for moderation among our public officials. The Washington Times reports Postmaster General John E. Potter has received a nearly 40% pay raise since 2006 and even got a six-figure incentive bonus last year. This as the USPS faces a multibillion-dollar shortfall that threatens a day of mail delivery. This will be the subject [...]

Was the Tower of Babel the first subprime mortgage crisis? Look at Genesis 11:1-9.
Everyone on Earth spoke one language. They settled on a plain in the land of Shinar where they decided to build a city and a tower that reached the heavens. Why? The Bible says it was to “make a name for ourselves.” In [...]