The mission statement of Brigham Young University, the flagship school of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, says nothing about pursuing spots in the College Football Playoff or the Final Four.

It does say that BYU graduates “should be capable of competing with the best in their fields.”

So, in this era of “name, image and likeness,” with athletic budgets soaring into the mega-millions, does that mean the Cougars are correct to play this spending game in order to compete with the best on the field, in the gym, on the court and on the diamond?

Some boosters “rise and shout” an emphatic yes. Others worry that the school risks putting, in essence, football before faith, and veering from its principal purpose: following in the footsteps of Jesus.

On this week’s show, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Kevin Reynolds, who covers BYU athletics and wrote a cover story recently on the topic, discusses this balancing act.

For many early Utah pioneers, James Brown Jr. was a hero of sorts. He led a Mormon Battalion company into the Salt Lake Valley just days after Brigham Young. He and his family settled Ogden, which became known for a time as Brownsville, and he served as a Latter-day Saint bishop.

As a prominent leader, he married 13 women — all sealed to him in temple rites — and fathered 28 children.

What most church members didn’t know was that James Jr. had Black grandparents — and that carries significance, given that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a policy barring Black members from holding the priesthood or entering temples from 1852 to 1978.

On this week’s show, Brigham Young University history professor Jenny Hale Pulsipher, a descendant of Brown, discovered his racial ancestry, and W. Paul Reeve, who is head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah and has done the most scholarly research on African Americans in the church, discuss this finding and how it helps modern believers understand the messiness of the past and the “impossibility of policing racial boundaries” through profiling.

Gordon B. Hinckley, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stepped up to the microphone in General Conference in the fall of 2000 and solemnly denounced tattoos as “graffiti on the temple of the body.”

The following year, the faith’s “For the Strength of Youth” pamphlet pointedly counseled young people not to “disfigure” themselves with tattoos.

With those words, body art — no matter how innocent, innocuous or ingrained in one’s cultural heritage — joined a list of forbidden fruits for faithful Latter-day Saints.

A quarter century later, though, that prophetic prohibition has been silenced, or at least softened, and the explicit condemnation of tattoos removed from the latest youth guidelines.

Is the tattoo taboo, unlike that indelible ink, fading in mainstream Mormonism? Is such artwork no longer a mark of rebellion but rather, with the emerging embrace of Latter-day Saint symbols in some tattoos, now a symbol of that very faith?

On this week’s show, Ethan Gregory Dodge, co-founder of the former MormonLeaks website, a devotee of body art, editor of Tattootime magazine and an occasional Salt Lake Tribune contributor, explore this evolution, if not revolution. He also discussed the topic at a recent Sunstone Symposium.