Latest from Mormon Land: There’s a new attraction on Salt Lake City’s Temple Square

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A first look at a new ‘First Vision’

It is fitting that the first in a series of new statues to go up on downtown Salt Lake City’s emerging Temple Square makeover is of the “First Vision.”

The artwork depicts the birth of the religion in the cradle of Mormonism in upstate New York, where a teenage Joseph Smith, the faith’s founder, reported seeing God and Jesus in the spring of 1820. (Revisit this 2020 “Mormon Land” podcast to learn about Smith’s various accounts of this encounter.)

“When I was creating the face of God, it was a very humbling undertaking because I tried to create something … anybody could connect to,” artist Michael Hall said in a news release, “so there are elements of all [humankind] in both the face of God and Christ.”

The statue, sitting in the northwest section of Temple Square, is open for public viewing. Other works by area artists will follow throughout the next two years, with renovations to the iconic six-spired temple and surrounding campus expected to wrap up in 2026.

“Temple Square has always had gardens and sculptures,” Bill Williams, director of temple design, said in the release. “This renovation allowed us to reimagine the story these sculptures and gardens could tell.”

The landmark Seagull Monument and Priesthood Restoration statue also will return to the square, one of Utah’s top tourist destinations.

The latest ‘Mormon Land’ podcast: An ‘A’ for Africa

Where is the church expanding fastest?

In a word, Africa, where 11 of the top 13 nations with the highest 2023 growth rates from around the world were located.

So, what is the appeal of this American-born faith in lands so physically and culturally distant? Why do some Africans see this patriarchal institution as a “woman’s church”? How has the Word of Wisdom helped transform families there? And why is the church’s wealth sometimes viewed as a “double-edged sword” in these countries?

Listen to the podcast.

Kicking off in Kansas City

• Light the World Giving Machines continue to generate headlines — and hope — this holiday season in a record 107 cities across the globe.

In Kansas City, Missouri, for example, the big red kiosks — where shoppers can donate to charity with a simple swipe of a credit card — are working their magic inside historic Union Station.

Apostle Gerrit Gong and the Bonner Family singers recently appeared at a kickoff ceremony, which also drew the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.

“In this world where there are many needs, none of us can do everything,” Gong said in a news release, “but every one of us can do something.”

The day before, the church leader attended a Kansas City Chiefs football game, where the Bonners performed the national anthem.

Remembering Eliza

Poet Eliza R. Snow of “O My Father” fame died 137 years ago this week, on Dec. 5, 1887, at age 83.

Snow, the second general president of the Relief Society, spent decades serving Latter-day Saint women. A plural wife of Joseph Smith and his immediate successor, Brigham Young, she never had children. Still, she birthed hundreds of poems and became one of the most prominent, praised and powerful women in church history.

Learn more about her life and legacy by tuning in to this 2020 “Mormon Land” podcast.

You can also read The Discourses of Eliza R. Snow — more than a thousand of them — and see how this reluctant public speaker became a powerhouse preacher.

“She was a rock star,” historian Jennifer Reeder has said. “In her 80s, she sometimes spoke three times a day.”

In 2016, scholar Andrea Radke-Moss detailed evidence indicating that a young Snow may have been gang-raped by anti-Mormon Missourians. That may explain, historians have suggested, her “rage” and “angry” writings from that period.

From The Tribune

• In Part 2 of our continuing series on the Beehive State’s religious divide, we explore the world of dating, and how the tensions that often exist between Latter-day Saints and their fellow Utahns can complicate romance, sex and the quest for lasting love. We also examine the even trickier waters that LGBTQ members must navigate when dating.

• In a rare mediation, the church compromises with a town on the design of a proposed temple. (Think, for starters, a shorter steeple.)

• What should Latter-day Saints do, Tribune columnist Gordon Monson wonders, if their personal inspiration differs from what church leaders declare?

• A transgender woman, once a stake (regional) president and temple architect, speaks out in her new memoir, “Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman.”

• It happened again. An anti-Latter-day Saint chant broke out at a BYU basketball game. The Catholic college later apologized.