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— No middle class, no middle class morality — George Pyle | The Salt Lake Tribune

" ... It was a remarkable scene, what with high-ranking worthies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doing grip-and-grins with Pope Francis. There was much shared woe and concern. But it may have been the American evangelicals who came the closest to just saying what they think the problem is. Basically, its women. And gay people. But mostly women. ...

" ... But, if they are really worried about how families survive, how children are raised, the LDS all-stars who met with their global Catholic counterparts in Rome would have done a lot more good if they had joined their local Catholic counterparts at Utah's Capitol to argue in favor of a full expansion of Medicaid, prison reform and other real-world cures for the problems that cause real families and real children to suffer needlessly. ..."

— Pope, Mormon leader make history with a handshake — Peggy Fletcher Stack | The Salt Lake Tribune

— Interfaith conference at Vatican unlocks beautiful language of natural law — Drew Clark | The Deseret News

" ... So many religions and faith traditions — 14 from 23 countries were represented at last week's conference — believe that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. Yet we can be isolated within our own faith traditions and take the truth about complementarity in marriage for granted. ..."

— So which 'traditional marriage' do people want to save? — Rick Knuth | For The Salt Lake Tribune

" ... Until the last 200 years or so, marriage in Western culture was not seen as a means of personal or emotional fulfillment, but was intended to secure social, familial or economic advantages. The idea that the couple would have anything to say in the matter would have been considered radical. ..."

— Rome's Extraordinary Ecumenical Event — Maggie Gallagher | National Review Online

" ... But for me, this thing rang out most clearly in the words of a member of the First Presidency of the LDS church, Henry B. Eyring. The meeting of President Eyring and Pope Francis was in itself historic. The Mormons are the one major American faith tradition (with the possible exception of the modern Orthodox Jews), who are successfully combining living in the "real world" with creating a distinctive, effective family culture. And they have built this extraordinary achievement, President Eyring was trying to remind us, not primarily on the head but on the human heart. ..."

— Divine Revision: How Mormons will come to accept homosexuality — William Saletan | Slate

" ... When Mormons pray hard enough, and they know what they want to hear, they'll hear it. ..."

— The Strange Religious Future — Ross Douthat — The New York Times

" ... So context matters — and while I don't know how many Mormons would frame it exactly this way, I think one way to read that context is to look at the revelation suspending polygamy and see God basically blessing a political-cultural bargain between the Latter Day Saints and the United States, in which Mormons would be granted the liberty required to thrive in return for adapting themselves to American familial norms … as adapt they did, becoming the archetype of 1950s bourgeois normality and then remaining archetypal long after that norm had ceased to meaningfully exist.

"But if that bargain was real, and not only real but divinely-sanctioned, then what should pious Mormons today make of the fact that the United States now seems to be going back on the deal? How should they respond to the possibility that their faith is becoming effectively alien again, developing another 'marriage problem,' because it still hews to the terms of the original deal even as American culture demands assent to a very different, effectively post-biblical, understanding of what marriage is supposed to be? ..."

— The Return of Mormon Polygamy? — Rod Dreher | The American Conservative

" ... It's a provocative thought: if traditional marriage is no longer exclusive in law and culture in the United States, and if the American people have come to believe (as we have) that marriage is something we have the right to redefine as we wish, then why shouldn't the polygamous instinct buried deep within the LDS faith not reassert itself? If I were a Mormon inclined to return to the fundamentals of my faith, I would wonder why, exactly, honoring the old bargain still mattered. ..."

— Politics and religion — Ogden Standard-Examiner Editorial

"It was ex­tremely dis­taste­ful for a bishop in The Church of Je­sus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints to pub­lish a blog in which he ac­cused U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a fel­low Mor­mon, of be­ing un­wor­thy to en­ter the church's temples. The po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion of an LDS Church mem­ber is not a fac­tor in a church mem­ber re­ceiv­ing a temple rec­om­mend. ..."