this is our greatest festival

We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. … This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity.

N. T. Wright

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008), 256, as found in "The Greatest Easter Story Ever Told," by Gary E. Stevenson. General Conference April 2023

curved - into a mere comma

Therefore, as this Easter Day draws to a close, how fitting that we contemplate atoning Jesus - bending and curved in Gethsemane. His bleeding curvature transformed the grammar of death. Until Gethsemane and Calvary, death was a punctuating, rigid exclamation point! Then death, too, curved - into a mere comma!


Neal A. Maxwell (1926 – 2004) was an apostle and a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1981 until his death. "Take Especial Care of your Family", Ensign May 1994 p. 91 Mark 14:35,36