Last week, as I was listening to news headlines on the radio, my heart stopped for a few seconds.

Five Afghan children. Caught in the crossfire between US forces and Taliban militants. Dead.

Ten seconds on a news broadcast on a Tuesday morning.

Not infrequently, I take a fast from the news. This kind of awful, evil, ugly can really start to pile up on you at times.

Thousands killed in an earthquake.

Millions displaced by civil war.

Countless, beautiful young people gunned down in city streets.

It’s big and omni-present, and sometimes it’s too much. A friend of mine captured well how I feel:

The human heart was never built to handle global suffering.

Now, if ever, is a time when we need truly prophetic voices. Global suffering is before our eyes every day. We’re facing the kind of depravity and suffering that calls for a prophet standing on a city wall, withstanding stones and arrows to deliver the message of redemption. We need Isaiah, condemning the powerful for oppressing their workers. We need the warnings of Mormon, who saw that inequality, materialism, and greed would spell doom for the Kingdom of God.

Across the pulpit at General Conference; in the pages of the Ensign; in the SLC-approved Sunday School curriculum–we hear a lot about good and evil, right and wrong. This discourse addresses such weighty matters as:

coffee

sleeve length

inappropriate entertainment

and miles upon miles of words about who you can and cannot have sex with

There is no talk of sexual violence. The causes of global poverty. Wage theft. Hate crimes.

The United States, birthplace of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is resorting to torture in its quest to build empire. Torture.

Our prophets’ response?

Radio silence.

We are supposed to have God’s true and living prophet to help our human hearts navigate global suffering.

Prophets like Jeremiah, whose song of Lamentations for a fallen city applies just as tragically to Baghdad today as it did to Jerusalem then.

Prophets like Esther, who risked her own life to save her people from obliteration.

Prophets like Abinadi, who warned his people that their love of riches and bloodshed and sexual violence would spell their destruction.

Prophets like the Messiah, who went down into oppression and suffering, so that he could spread light and peace and healing.

Instead we have a mall.

Our leaders obsess over modesty, and gender roles, and doing their utmost to keep those gays from loving each other. They’ll spend millions of dollars keeping the wrong kind of couple from marriage, but never find space in all their preaching about sex to mention the word rape.

It is so hard to find my place in this church when the chief concerns are so empty and insignificant.

What good are prophetic voices that maintain total silence on the most pressing moral matters of our time?

Moses might have told the children of Israel who to sleep with or what to wear.

But first, he led his people out of slavery.

That’s the kind of prophetic leadership our world is dying for today.

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Update: the reference to Moses at the end has been edited after many people rightly pointed out that I misrepresented his role as a prophet.