Hello friends. I’m watching Conference so you don’t have to. As with yesterday’s post, I will do real-time updates after each speaker. Words in quotes only when I’m pretty sure I caught the exact words on the fly. If I add my own comments, they will be in brackets and italics.
Bonus Talks from Saturday Evening
Elder Garret W. Gong — on temples. He quoted AI Gong, which gave a better talk than real Elder Gong. Here it is in full, the first Conference talk generated by AI: “Why did the humble tree make people smile? Because it was rooted in love and reached out with branches of kindness. Like that tree, we too can find strength in our roots and joy in extending kindness to others.” [This is going to be a big problem: AI can generate better Sunday talks than 99% of rank and file LDS that are sent to the podium on Sunday and better General Conference talks than most GAs. Try this prompt for your next Sacrament Meeting talk: “Write a ten-minute speech on faith, hope, and charity in the style of a progressive Mormon who is frustrated the LDS membership has surrendered to the MAGA movement.”]
Elder David A. Bednar — on pride and the Book of Mormon. O how quickly the Nephites could slip into pride, iniquity, and apostasy. Prosperity is dangerous. It makes you think you are self-sufficient. It leads to spiritual blindness. It leads to a rapid spiritual decline. [Beating us with the Pride Stick. So much for the Great Plan of Happiness. This talk was as depressing as a Trump rally speech.]
[I think senior leaders have been wringing their hands because, after the overbuilding program, members are not flocking to the temples that now dot the land. Too much prosperity and pride, they have concluded. Memo to the leadership: It’s not just the membership that is having a problem with pride.]
Sunday Morning
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland — on Jesus, Prince of Peace and Man of Sorrows. Don’t be a cafeteria Mormon, avoiding things you find uncomfortable. Don’t dumb down the gospel. Sometimes you get grace and forgiveness; sometimes you have to swallow the bitter cup. Jesus exemplified complete obedience. But there is a Force in the universe that opposes every good thing you try to do. [Really old people tend to get more harsh and extreme in their views, regardless of their younger personality.]
Tracy R. Browning, 2C in RS Presidency — on reassessing our views and beliefs. Short astronomy lecture; Pluto is not a planet anymore. Limits of our spiritual understanding (but they can be expanded?). Obedience to covenants leads to God blessing us more. Don’t depart from the Covenant Path. [Wow. If she’s in a meeting with the Big 15, she’s the smartest one in the room. But, after a strong start, I didn’t like her shift to transactional grace and blind obedience at the end.]
Brook P. Hales, Seventy and Secretary to the First Presidency — on something. He talked in general terms about being a victim of the unrighteous actions of another while a teenager and the shame and difficulties this caused. His struggles with feelings of guilt and to overcome those feelings. Some listeners will find this talk helpful and reassuring. [The subtitle on the screen was confusing. While serving as the Secretary to the First Presidency, Brook P. Hales was called as a GA Seventy in 2018. He continues to serve as Secretary to the First Presidency.]
L. Todd Budge, 2C in the Presiding Bishopric — on stillness and quiet spiritual nourishment. “Make time for the Lord in our lives each and every day.” Recommends meditation. “Slow down and live with greater spiritual awareness.” Don’t just read but savor the scriptures.
Elder Gary A. Stevenson — on the Four Icons. Sometimes your smart phone pulls a bunch of your pictures together and shows you a short montage of your life over the last decade. What about your next decade? He shows the Four Icons. Pray, show compassion, share the gospel, unite families for eternity.
Bradley R. Wilcox, 1C in the Young Men — on being different as an LDS. Opens with funny quips. Youth are concerned about, as LDS, having to be so different from other youth, from other people. But think of all the blessings you will receive! It’s your birthright (because of premortal choices, etc.), you are children of the covenant. Be different from the World. You can’t be a lifeguard if you look like all the other swimmers on the each, plus you get paid. [So the purpose of life is to get paid; more transactional grace.]
Pres. Eyring — [Missed this one.]
Sunday Afternoon
Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf — on having faith that endures. Your testimony will be tried. Faith is not strong if it is not tested. We can’t see the future. Faith is like a tree that you need to nourish constantly. [Uchtdorf has lost his fastball.]
Takashi Wada, a Seventy — follow the Plan. He was a teenage convert. An English Gideon’s Bible converted him to Christianity. A few years later, he encountered two LDS missionaries. The rest is history.
Elder Ronald A. Rasband — on how to sustain your leaders. Sustain the leadership of the Church, general and local. Sustain family members. Sustaining the LDS President means a personal commitment to uphold his prophetic priorities and defend him. We need to do more lifting and less murmuring. Temples. Angels. [Not a cult.]
Elder Quentin L. Cook — on scriptures and conversion. No handheld device will compete with the scriptures and personal revelation. Scriptures facilitate conversion. Scriptures strengthen us to resist Satan. Bonus points for telling an Andy Reid story. New members joining the Church everywhere! Beware of online material intended to draw you away from the Church. Algorithms will suck you down rabbit holes toward darkness and foolish beliefs. [God bless the Internet.]
Ruben V. Alliaud, a Seventy — on the LDS Godhead. Everyone else calls it the Trinity. Bible verses, and so forth. [You’ve heard this talk before.]
I. Raymond Egbo, a Seventy — on joy. Praises the Nigerian national soccer team that won gold at the 1996 Olympics. Alma the Younger found joy. [The joy of victory and the agony of defeat.]
President Nelson — a recorded talk. Renovation of the Salt Lake Temple should be completed by the end of 2026. We have dedicated 9 temples this year, with 5 more coming shortly. Seventeen new temples announced: Milan, Dublin, Couer d’Alene, Huntsville, Milwaukee, New Jersey, Price, and a few each in South America and Africa. Why all the building? Because God said to do so, gathering Israel on both sides of the veil.
Prepare for the Second Coming. Make discipleship your highest priority. Regular temple attendance will help. He relates some difficult personal experiences. Devote time each week to understanding the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Rededicate your lives to Jesus Christ. The Lord is hastening His work. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed. [Choir sings Handel’s “And the Glory of the Lord” in closing. Sounds great. Might be the best five minutes of Conference.]
[Summary: No big news this Conference. Listening to all these talks, you would not know the future of the USA, home base of the Church, hangs in the balance in the upcoming election a month away. You would not know that there is a land war raging in Europe, with Putin regularly waving the nuclear threat. You would not know that the Middle East is slowly blowing up. Global catastrophe might be just around the corner. I’m surprised no speaker talked about emergency preparedness, food storage, 72-hour kits, and so forth. Maybe they don’t want to encourage LDS preppers. Thanks for reading. Signing off.]
Wheat & Tares 
Hearing Bednar talk about the evils of pride is perhaps the most ironic experience I’ve had all year and we are ten months into the year!
Bednar also remarked that the Book of Mormon was not only historical, but it told the future. So magical!
@Josh H – Bednar’s was truly ironic. At one point in his talk he said something to the effect of, if we believe we are above the possibility of “Pride” taking over, we will be ever more susceptible to it. He then said there are two kinds of apostacy, Institutional and Individual, and makes the blatantly arrogant claim that the Institution will “Never” fall. He just got finished saying we should never consider ourselves above “Prides” reach and then he makes an overtly prideful statement, Bizarre.
I also believe he fundamentally misunderstands “Pride”, and what its roots are, Clue, it’s built right into your belief that covenants are contracts.
Bednar talking on pride? He needed a mirror in front of him instead of his teleprompter. He sees the pride in others, but not in his own egotistical demand that members worship him.
Good thing I am not actually watching, but just checking out what’s going on by checking in here
I’m assuming he’s harking back to Benson’s talk on pride. Most especially since he mentions Benson, and also alluded to things in Helaman.
The sacrament meeting talks at my ward and my aunt’s ward (two hours away) were both about pride in the past two weeks, and they all quoted the Benson talk extensively. I wonder if they had any information or rumors that pride was going to be a theme of this GC?
The comments on Elder Bednar are spot on. I have been near him in a small group setting on two different occasions. Pride and arrogance live loudly in him.
And for whatever it’s worth…..I have also met Pres Oaks and spent time with him one-on-one for about twenty minutes. The caricature of him as icy, cold and calculating couldn’t be further from the truth. He was probably the most humble, warm, genuine and authentic person I have ever met. Seriously.
Another female speaking in a normal adult voice.
I sometimes wonder if the discussion of “the primary voice” on blogs like this have been the reason that it has pretty much disappeared from Gen Conf?
SInce the Q15 have minimal contact with real members and their struggles, what they talk about and perception of the world is their own families issues, clique ladder climbing friends, or within their own sub-conscious.
Ah, currently listening to the Brad Wilcox talk. It is simply too much.
no pride or arrogance here at W&T
RE: Gong, the problem isn’t that members and GAs will start using chatbots to write their talks, but that we’ve all been trained to write talks like chatbots all along.
Seriously, the chatbots work by “scraping” the internet for every pre-existing text on a certain topic given the inputted prompts, plagiarize its style, and then statistically model whatever is the most likely next word to appear in sequence will be, like a glorified autocorrect. The end result is, by design, the most generic and blandest combination of words possible.
But then, that is exactly how we train our membership to write talks as well–especially since the advent of assigning Conference talks as topics! With rare exception, we do not prioritize nor incentivize originality and creativity in our talks, but only a bland regurgitation of what has already come before. Small wonder then that the talks that chatbots generate for us sound so robotic: they have merely been mimicking our robotic style to begin with. We have been taught to write like machines, not like human beings.
Brad Wilcox: If you’re a good member of God’s crew, you get paid! It certainly seems to be working for him. In order for this analogy to work, all the crew members are men, right?
Honestly, if you know which speakers signal it is time to check the meat in the smoker (Bednar and Wilcox), it is not a half bad conference. I’m sad that Elder Holland’s health appears to be declining.
Bednar’s warning about prosperity is interesting. If prosperity leads to sin, does church leadership want to keep members from prospering? Is that the reason for the hamfistedness in distributing financial aid to members? In demanding 10% of everyone’s income? In limiting people’s fun and keeping them in the monotony of temple service? In pressuring families to have more children than they can afford?
But then, if the gospel demands asceticism and poverty, why are our leaders all rich dudes on humongous stipends with enormous lines of credit? Bednar and the others sure seem to be prospering all right.
Maybe the Q15 are immune to the perils of prosperity. They are incapable of leading the church astray, after all, and an undisclosed number of them have their 2nd anointing, so prosperity must only be dangerous to us poor saps in the congregation and not in the red chairs.
@Kirsktall – all of the quorum of the 12 plus counselors to the President have had their 2nd anointing. I assume since they are the ones that administer it to other people.
a lot of stay in the boat kind of discussion again.
E. Rasband talk makes me feel like I belong to a cult.
Rasband: President Nelson President Nelson President Nelson President Nelson. I bear my testimony of Presid…Jesus Christ, Amen.
I cannot recall talks like that. I’m sure some exist, but Rasband felt like there is a sense of members not sustaining the president. Seemed a little desperate. I don’t remember messages like this under other eight presidents that I’ve known.
Margaret Thatcher was once quoted as saying something to the effect of “If you [or one of your followers?] have to insist to everyone in the room that you are the leader, you’re not.”
Thank you for your summaries, but I disagree with your assessment of Elder Uchtdorfs talk. Focus on Jesus. Focus on Jesus. Everything else is purely secondary. I felt as though he was freed to give a talk he finally believes in. God bless him.
Thanks for your summaries, Dave. It was fun to hang out here during the conference.
Summaries really brilliant and have helped me preserve what vestiges of testimony I have left. And really grateful for your p.s. Sometimes I think I’m the only LDS who watches the news.
Is anybody going to fact-check the statement that P. Nelson had a gun to his head with the trigger pulled with a miraculous misfire?
I saw Huntsville in the temple list and assumed it was Huntsville Utah population 650 nestled in the mountains and thought that is insane. Turns out the temple will be in Huntsville AL which probably makes slightly more sense.
I still wonder who will man all these temples two generations from now but I guess that’s a problem for a future prophet to deal with. Our own beloved LA temple is only open half the week.
In order to preserve my well being I do not watch conf so I appreciate those who do. Thanks.
The story of the robbery in Mozambique gets more dramatic with each retelling. There was no reporting at the time of any gun being aimed at Nelson. Like most of these faith-promoting tales they are most like hogwash.
“Listening to all these talks, you would not know the future of the USA, home base of the Church, hangs in the balance in the upcoming election a month away. You would not know that there is a land war raging in Europe, with Putin regularly waving the nuclear threat. You would not know that the Middle East is slowly blowing up. Global catastrophe might be just around the corner.“
But we already know these things. What we were reminded of today is that the Kingdom will prevail come what may–and that as individuals we need not fear if we put our trust in the Lord.
Jack, the Church’s timid silence on events that impact hundreds of millions worldwide is exactly the frustration here. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed similar frustration in “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” about the silence of the churches during the civil rights movement:
”There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.”
Amen, Jack. You said it before I could. Appreciate you. Was a great conference weekend. I feel nourished and stretched. The gospel is true.
If I had to give a personal, overall summary of what I heard during this conference (which is quite different, I think, from what any of the speakers were trying to teach), it would be the numerous “trust in Christ even when you are uncertain about the outcome” kind of messages. Each time a speaker said something like that, my own inner voice (is it the Spirit or some other source?) would say something like, “can I trust Christ and my testimony enough to reduce my participation or even leave the church?” When I think about my own, personal path, the path that will require the most faith, the most trust in God and Christ, is the path that leads towards the edge or even out of the church.
I don’t know. I guess only time will tell.
We are living in a time of wars and rumors of wars, of false prophets and false Christs, when people are calling right wrong and wrong right, when there are hurricanes and earthquakes in dire places, and people are saying lo here and lo there and nothing is mentioned in conference about any of it. We have more temples, and the prophet is 100, so I guess all is well, and God is happy. Oh, BTW, pay your tithing.
MrShorty, go for it!
Moderator,
This should be safe place for each of us to discuss real feelings about a variety of things without shaming. Please do not let another comment such as the Millennial Disciple made, be posted again. In fact I would like to see his comment removed.
Thematically, conference weekend struck me as having three main messages. First, embrace a spartan existence consisting mainly of reading scriptures and going to the temple–none of that worldly fun or work or extracurricular activities that distract from the monastic life. Second, all the efforts toward the canonization of RMN (looking at you in particular, Elder Rasband). Third, the Nemo situation clearly has the Q15 spooked, which led to a lot of iterations of “stay in the boat” commentary.
Elder Holland actually looked and sounded worse health-wise than even RMN or Eyring, which is a little surprising (even granting JRH’s recent health issues).
Elder Kearon’s talk was by far the best of all of the Q12…perhaps not surprisingly.
A temple in Price is peak saturation in Utah. At this rate, we should get one in Kanab or Scofield before too long.
The main reason I cannot wait for the April 2025 conference is to get new material for sacrament meeting talks and EQ/RS lessons since this weekend’s set of talks is going to be painful to rehash for the next six months.
Just coming by to criticize your snarky and self-righteous behavior by being snark and self-righteous. And I’m repeating an unsubstantiated and demonstrably false demographic because…row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
Thanks Dave for the summaries, please do them again next conference. I do have a pushback against the first line of your final paragraph: “Summary: No big news this Conference.”
Yeah, no big news except the announcement that “There are temporary commandments.” WHAT!? President Oaks, please, please, tell us more about some of these temporary commandments. If you’re open to suggestions, I have a few ideas.
I could be wrong, but I feel like President Oaks just set the stage for some major possible future changes (either by him or future presidents of the church), and I think that is big news.
A temple in Price is peak saturation in Utah. At this rate, we should get one in Kanab or Scofield before too long.
I get your point, but it is not quite accurate. Once upon a time, Price was the West Virginia of Utah–a coal mining community dominated by non-Mormons who voted Democratic. Now, all of the coal mines in the surrounding county have closed, any new economic activity is more Mormon-friendly, and the county is as reliably Republican as West Virginia has become. Peak saturation will be temples in Moab and Park City, which have maintained their non-Mormon (and Democratic) identities since their mines closed.
Most of the talks sounded desperate to me. The Q15 see the exodus from the church but aren’t interested enough to figure out how to engage or re-engage the members who haven’t jumped ship yet. As has been said many times before the definition of insanity it doing the same things over and over but expecting different outcomes. They seem to engage in the “all is well in Zion. Zion is prospering.” magical thinking that Nephi talks about in 2Nephi. Meanwhile these men are cocooned from the real world thanks to their second anointings, the mega billions in the bank and in real estate and the corporate mindset that the little people don’t matter. Throw in the “We’re God’s chosen ones.” mindset and clueless or, heaven forbid, totally uncaring people at the top and this is a recipe for disaster. I would dearly love to have a church version of Undercover Boss” where the leaders have to live the lives those whom they are responsible for live. No titles of honor or special treatment. In fact, give them new names and change their looks somehow. Let these men have to choose between paying tithing or paying their bills, entertain a group of Sunbeams for nearly an hour, plan a meaningful activity for the youth with little or no money, etc. You get the idea. Until such time that the leaders humble themselves enough in order to seriously try to figure out why so many members, many of them having been faithful members all of their lives, are leaving in droves nothing will change, and they will only have themselves to blame.
To Poor Wayfaring Stranger’s point, the church no longer seems to emphasize growth in numbers of converts, knowing that there is not too much to show there. Instead, they focus on a sort of fake growth of temple construction. A very desperate attempt to fool the members that the church is flourishing. But it seems to work. My wife and her siblings were sending texts back and forth about the excitement of the 17 new temples announced. My mom called and gushed about how my niece, who just got a job with a company contracted out to the church to build temples, will have a lot of work to do because of all these new temples. Why do the believers get so excited about the temples? Will they visit them? No. Are they really that excited about more names of dead people have ordinances done for them? Perhaps to some extent. Are they excited that more members will have easier access to temple attendance? Again, perhaps to some extent. But the most important reason is that the temples somehow symbolize that their religion is growing, spreading across the world, getting stronger, and gaining more and more visibility. They like the idea that their organization and its leaders are accomplishing something. These leaders have to be great somehow, right? It can’t be just giving regurgitated talks every six months, could it? But is the church really growing? Is it really spreading fast across the world? I simply doubt it. Its growth has slowed. Where the church is growing is in ways that it does not want it members to see: profit. And it can afford these vanity projects that will serve basically no purpose other than to just stand there, be something for people to look at, and a very small number of people to actually gather in. Do these provide shelter? No. Do these provide food? No. Do these provide education? No. Do these even provide assembly? Barely. But assembly in a qualified sense. There are no sermons given, no rallying, no conferences, etc. Only the assembly of very quiet, rigid ritual with hardly any interaction.
I second the observation of Brad D. As a GenXer I distinctly recall the thrill of the church membership passing the next million milestone – from 5 million to 10 million and then 15 million. But now, not only has the rate of growth changed but we know the membership numbers are fuzzy and do not equate to real membership growth.
So membership numbers have been replaced by temple numbers. The beauty of this switch is the church corporation fully controls the number. Not only can buildings be counted but it is simple for the leadership to announce new temple sites. And now, instead of using membership growth to claim the church is spreading throughout the world, we have temple buildings and site announcements showing the church is spreading throughout the world.
Temples not only give the church a growth story, but they may also serve as anchors of church investment. An area that gets a temple is now identified as a place the church sees as having potential for growth, or as a place worth fighting to preserve the current numbers. This would be a strong reason to place temples where they would never have made sense. The argument is no longer about meeting the demand for temple work (although that story holds for certain locations) but rather that the temple will hopefully help an area draw and retain church members.
President Nelson discussing the Second Coming in his concluding message points to a key test. Nothing will validate President Nelson more than the Second Coming occurring in the midst of the temple boom. However, if the boom fizzles and temples go empty and even unbuilt and Christ does not come then what?
I listened to Nelson’s closing remarks. He sincerely believes in the necessity of all these temples. I can see that members are looking at temple construction as a sign of growth, but I don’t see that as a primary goal of the church leadership. I think this is driven primarily by Nelson and his apocalyptic thinking. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a significant pause or slowdown of announcements after he’s gone, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even now some apostles are raising eyebrows at some of the temples.
One of my concerns with the new temple construction is making them bigger than they need to be. The Hinckley-era mini-temples built 20 years ago were frequently 10000 square foot structures that are 30% smaller than the average stake center. I don’t see a problem building more of those closer to people. They aren’t particularly expensive, and don’t cause problems with the neighbors. Building oversized temples in places that don’t particularly need them and where the neighbors would prefer something smaller is the part that is bugging me a bit.
Hedgehog: “Benson’s talk on pride” that I used to love until I realized that he literally plagiarized it from C.S. Lewis without attribution.
Elder Kearon? I honestly don’t understand how he connects with so many here. He comes across as smarmy to me. Too clever by half. But to each their own.
No rocks will be thrown by me, though. Heaven knows I’ve personally got a lot worse going on than smarmy.
Temple numbers are either going to be replaced with something else before too much longer, or things are going to start getting silly. The backlog of temples to be built is continually increasing. There are currently 116 temples announced where construction has not started and an additional 49 under construction. This year is going to be the first of the Nelson presidency where the number of completed temples (21) is even half of the number announced (32). Announcing a temple is easy. Building them takes a lot of work, and the builders aren’t keeping up with the announcer.
If current trends continue, in another decade the backlog could be 200 or 250 temples. It is also interesting to note that we’re announcing nearly as many temples as we are creating stakes. In 2023 it was net +44 stakes, and 37 announced temples. In 2024 it is 38 stakes (with a few months to go) and 32 temples. If every announced temple were magically completed today, there would be one temple for every 10 stakes. Either temple districts are going to be less than 10 stakes, or we’re going to have to slow down on the temples (or speed up on the stakes, I guess). If we were to keep announcing 35 temples per year, dedicating 20 and creating 45 new stakes, we’ll hit the 10 stakes/temple threshold in 2034. (And if you really like extrapolation, in 2070 we’d hit 5 stakes per temple with 1100+ temples, and about 800 more on the backlog. Which means in 2070 we’d be dedicating temples that had been announced 25 years prior.) I guess there’s not a lot to stop the church from heading down that road. So long as the stock market holds up, they can keep announcing and building temples, I suppose.
@Fred, I know Elder Kearon personally and he isn’t smarmy at all. Genuinely warm, funny, humble. just FYI. And I agree with knowing Oaks in person too, he really is so witty and smiley.
Thanks for the summaries–my absolute favorite talk was Saturday night, Kristin Yee, which didn’t get a mention here. Loved her artwork, analogy, and earnest testimony.
Hawkgrrrl,
President Benson’s talk is similar to C. S. Lewis’ chapter on pride in terms of theme–though it’s placed in a restoration framework. Even so, where he quotes Lewis directly he also attributes it to him.
Thanks Anita. It’s so easy to mis-judge people when you’ve only seen them from a distance and in one setting. Always good to hear from someone with personal experience.
I’m pretty sure the scholarly consensus is that Beson didn’t even write that talk, but some family member did. Can’t recall who right off. A woman, I believe. And it makes sense. I mean, there’s no way Benson wrote that talk. So many anti-capitalist statements in that talk; not sure how he even got them out.
There are the same number of Mormons as Jews. Every night on the news there are more people being killed by Israel, and Jews claiming they are being persecuted.
When Nelson dies I doubt it will get a mention on the news here. He announced a temple near here a year ago. Perhaps when they start building or open it, it might be mentioned.
The church, if it does nothing to help the world’s problems is irrelevant.
Are politicians concerned we might withdraw our support?
At least we haven’t killed 44000 people who disagreed with us. Or are killing other political/religious leaders.
Lws329,
I’ve slowly come to realize that most at W&T value safety over a number of other things I would consider noble endeavors (I made a sincere suggestion on another thread a few months ago that maybe you could do a guest post on what it means, since I think it means different things to many people, and has even been ascribed to me at times when I believed I was doing the exact opposite by reaching beyond my comfort zone), but for some reason your last comment struck me as uncharacteristically intolerant of you. I see the previous commenter’s comment is actually deleted now. It probably means my days here are indeed numbered as well, though I’ve been more successful weaning myself away on my own. I’ve come to believe that as far as practical learning goes, I’ve now learned most all the bloggers and frequent commenters here have to offer. They’ve tempered a few of my views, but as a conservative LDS who came here about eight or nine years ago, I’ve largely come full circle at this point.
As far as the OP, one of the biggest ironies I find at W&T is when it criticizes the Church for sticking its nose too far in our lives but criticizes conference for not going into specifics or outlining other information that would, well, possibly make the Church stick its nose too far in our lives. I realize that’s not exactly what the post is trying to do, but it often come across that way.
One of my favorite things about the temple is when the mind starts to wander, and I get thoughts, ideas, and feelings that seemingly have nothing to do with the temple. Although I try to pay attention where it counts, I now know that’s actually a hallmark of the temple, not a diverting flaw.
Similar things happen at conference from time to time. I have no doubt half the bloggers listed here no longer believe in the reality of the Gift of the Holy Ghost, if they ever did to begin with, but I’ve come to find the reality not only believable, but extremely reasonable. I’ve entertained the possibility I’m wrong (you can only read so many posts here and not entertain that possibility), but really wonder at times how often people here entertain the possibility that a sizeable number of active members really are on a path of revelation that will improve the world around them as walk it, no matter how innocuous, ridiculous, or possibly even harmful it might look from the outside. I do think a number of members have become “prophets unto themselves” and are content letting the Prophet give talks more suited for the child or new convert. In fact, I think that’s part of the goal.
On some level, I can appreciate the concern shown here towards “misguided” members of orthodoxy, but please try to be forgiving if we feel the energy is wasted from time to time, just as you feel is happening with the brethren and active membership.
Eli, how dare you accuse people on this blog who are PIMO or who have stepped away from the church as “no longer believing in the reality of the Holy Ghost, if they ever did to begin with”! I personally believe in the Holy Spirit even though I have chosen to step away from a spiritually dead religion. You don’t know me or what my spiritual experiences and beliefs are, and yet you feel like you can deliver a blanket condemnation of everyone who believes differently than you.
Thanks, Eli. You said I’d better and kinder than I could.
APWS,
With all due respect, do I respond to what you said or what you thought I actually said? I thought of it much less as a condemnation but rather a plea. And even it it was, it felt appropriate, that it needed to be said, and I see nothing blanket about the statement. There’s a wide variety of people here, I get that. Some personalities are stronger and larger in number than others.
I could say something very similar to you for your use of the words “dead religion” when it seems nothing of the sort to me, but since it seems it’s your safety that’s probably the primary concern here (I have no concern for my own at the moment anyway), let that be another reason W&T would do well to update its blog description, or even adopt a mission statement.
Thanks for the comments and discussion, everyone.
Yes, one comment was removed, something I do very rarely. I did so after polling the other contributors on our backlist. We actually have a comment policy, with a link right at the top of the page. The first item on our short list of unwelcome comments is this: “Personal attacks against others, including authors and commenters.” We’ve been doing this for years. We know the difference between disagreement (allowed) and something that crosses into attacks (not allowed).
Anyone unhappy with the summaries and short comments in the two Conference posts is welcome to set up their own blog, watch all sessions of Conference, write summaries of the talks in real time, invite comments from one and all, and monitor those comments.
Brian,
Here’s a link to a study done by latter-day saint scholars on how President Benson prepared his talk on pride:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1729&context=re
Jack, that link did not copy correctly. I think this is the article Jack is trying to link to:
“Beware of Pride”: Prophetic Preparation for a Classic Address | Religious Studies Center (byu.edu)
Jack,
I was a neighbor to Reed Benson while living in Provo. I was also a student in Reed’s BoM class. His wife, May Hinckley Benson, substituted for Reed’s BYU classes when Reed was out of town one week. (For the record, May was a much better teacher than Reed… Reed spent most of the semester sidetracked on politics, precious metals, Amway, and homeschooling). Anyway, May taught a lesson on pride that was practically identical to ETB’s talk. This was one year before the general conference talk was delivered. When rumors later spread that May wrote ETB’s talk for him, I gave those rumors credence. May Benson knew the topic well enough to lecture for two full classes to undergrads on the topic of pride. ETB was not up to writing that talk at the time and frequently used ghost writers throughout his life. So thanks May!
The irony of the Benson talk on pride is that it comes off as extremely arrogant. It’s message essentially is that if we leave the church, or even so much as disagree with the leaders, we are enemies to God. Truly preposterous.
“We know the difference between disagreement (allowed) and something that crosses into attacks (not allowed).”
If that were truly the case, I imagine nearly half of the comments from John W. (who I’m almost certain is now Brad D.) would have been deleted by now. I would be much more forgiving of the double-standard if it was a little more explicitly “standardized” in the description. But as you mentioned, that’s your prerogative. Forgive those of us who–even trying to take the view of an outsider– feel it’s made the blog look less and less professional over the years.
I had Reed Benson at BYU for BoM in fall 1998. I didn’t know anything back then other than who his dad was and I thought he was a fine teacher. I don’t recall him going off script. Not trying to discount anyone’s experience or make any excuses for someone I barely know. Perhaps after his dad was released as Prophet he simmered down.
As for commenting policy, pobody is nerfect. In my experience BCC deletes stuff all the time which makes the comments section disjointed, and at T&S personal attacks toward the nuanced/disaffected are a feature. Here I can count on one hand the number of comments deleted.
In this particular instance, I will also note that I was appalled at the comment, though I didn’t reply. After I settled down, I realized that this person’s failure to understand why some members who don’t currently participate would still want/need to keep a pulse on all things Mormon is their shortcoming, not mine, and it’s not my job to educate them.
I do find it interesting that in the last few conferences there has been at least one leader pleading with the Saints for more civility, and then immediately finding un-civil things being said all over social media. I guess it’s understandable to miss a few highlights after 10 hours in front of the telly.
Eli,
When I was a kid my mom worked at a safe house for battered women. Her experiences there informed her concerns for her daughters. She spent quite a lot of time teaching me what is abusive behavior and what is not. Personal attacks make the grade for abusive. I don’t come to W&T to be personally attacked or to witness personal attacks on others. If that will be allowed in this forum, I will stop reading or participating in discussions here. When I feel something is abusive I act on it immediately when it is a small thing, rather than waiting until it is an ingrained behavior.
I believe both Oaks and Nelson have recently talked about the concept of speaking with respect for each other as children of God. We can speak to each other and disagree, but show respect for other people’s personal decisions which we each really cannot fully understand. For me, the sin of pride is when we imagine we understand others, and thus are prepared to judge them.
Eli, I appreciated your invitation, to write on safety. I hope what I have written above will suffice for the time being. Right now I am a graduate student in Counseling. I am writing a research paper on Estranged Adult Children and Their Believing Parents in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a study of relationship dynamics.
I can understand why people may believe personal attacks should be tolerated, as they have become commonplace, particularly in our political discourse. However, just because they have become common doesn’t make them right. I will not tolerate them on any post I personally moderate, because I don’t want more of them. As my mother explained to me about abusive behavior: you will get more of whatever you put up with.
lws329,
Thank you for your response. Good luck in your graduate work. I hope you’ll still find time to come here, even if I spend a little less.
Remember the miracle at Goshen !!
I had Reed Benson for BoM for returned missionaries at BYU in the 80s. (I wasn’t a returned missionary, but I naively thought maybe the son of the prophet would have some serious insights about the BoM, which I was really searching for—and, incidentally, eventually gave up on). He barely mentioned the BoM, but had a lot to say about everything else. He regularly made fun of Jews (I called him out about this after class one time—he just laughed). He had a cheesy mantra for everything. Three Ds of the devil. Three Ws of happiness. You don’t take people out of the slums, you take the slums out of the people. He invited everyone to his house for parties and assigned the 3 females in the class of 50 to bring treats. He was horrid. That class was a good strong push down my path out of the church.
PS I didn’t go to the parties.
Dave B,
Thanks for fixing the link.
Dot: That’s horrible. Unfortunately, those attitudes are too common among men raised in patriarchy. There was an elder in my mission who behaved like that. I think he was the ZL at the time, and he told me he wanted us to do his investigator’s ironing. I laughed in his face, and no I did not do that. It was my last area, and he suggested a “going away” party for me and the other missionary who were leaving. Sounded great until he turned to me and assigned me to make the treats. I said, “So, you want me to throw a party for…me?” I again declined his “generous” offer. What the hell is wrong with these idiots?
I was very grateful for all of the new prophecies, visions, and revelations that the Q15 delivered this conference, especially the newly added Sections to the D&C! It so validates their claims as the only true prophets, seers and revelators on the earth today!
No, wait…
Hawkgrrrl: Wow. Don’t you just wonder what happened to that guy? Yeah—patriarchy creates some real monsters.
I’m trailing the discussion as usual, and I appreciate the summary and the comments. I do like to pay attention to the trends set for us by the Quorums in their main venue— Gen Con, and this is a great way for me to keep up.
I missed the offending comment that was deleted, but it must’ve been a doozy. Deleted comments are a rare occurrence at W&T, but what’s even rarer is a short, blunt rebuke from lws. She’s most always calm and sensible in her views, even the strongly held ones. But she doesn’t aspire to be meek, which is one of her best qualities. I advise not asking her for anything like that, but take her at her word when she lets us all know that she doesn’t tolerate abuse, because if you put up with it, you’ll get more of the same. Her mother is correct.
I read the document that Jack linked to regarding Benson’s pride talk. Apparently the authors were given access to some of Benson’s notes/papers, and they go into detail about what they found related to Benson’s pride talk. The paper about Benson’t talk was published in 2015, some 26 years after Benson gave his talk. In my opinion, the paper itself was pretty unremarkable–it just provided more detail than I would ever want to read about Benson’s notes. Was the whole purpose of the paper to try to establish that Benson’s talk was actually written by him because the authors and/or Benson’s family knew that there was some controversy about that? If so, the authors didn’t mention that they were writing the paper to demonstrate that Benson wrote it, so if that was the purpose of the paper, they are being kind of disingenuous about that. Also, they didn’t really prove that Benson wrote the talk at all, and given his health when the talk was given, he almost certainly did not write it. The paper gives quite a bit of reason to believe that whoever wrote the talk may have used Benson’s notes on the topic to write the talk, so in that sense much of the content of the talk may have originated from Benson, but it doesn’t give any reason to believe he actually wrote the talk.
On another note, I found the opening lines of the paper to be pretty funny. Those lines have Brad Wilcox, one of the three authors of the paper, written all over them:
I wasn’t alive when Kennedy was assassinated, but I absolutely do remember where I was on 9/11. Sorry, though, I most certainly don’t remember where I was when Benson gave his pride talk. Unfortunately, the GC talk that I remember the most was Packer’s masterpiece:
As to the openness of discussion, this blog is very open and includes a diverse array of commenters. The permas seem to be believers in some capacity who openly allow non-believer perspectives. A rarity. They even keep up comments from the occasional angry troll although some of these warrant being removed as is the case with any social media.
Re patriarchy. I was on a site where someone came on and described Trump as the orange mesiah and Harris as a vacuous whore. His explanation was that the church did not have women in positions of power because they lacked the ability to lead. Vacuous. And so a woman could not get into a position of power on merit so she must have slept her way to the positions she had attained. Whore.
Her degrees and the fact that the positions were often elected seem irrelevant.
RMN was mentioned more often than Jesus. Just sayin’…
I think Harris is vacous but it has nothing to do with what you mentioned Geoff. She just comes across as a person of moderate to low intelligence. Democrats could have done so much better. I wish they had run Hillary again. I wouldn’t have voted for her….but she’s whip smart, capable and a strong hand on the wheel.
Kamala Harris was admitted to the California Bar, 2d in difficulty only to the New York bar. A friend of mine practiced law and says she’s the real deal: smart, funny, kind. If tRump had made good grades he would be selling laminated copies on his website. Of course, his transcripts, tax records, health records, and favorite scripture are all secret. Why? Because he’s a liar. He’s the con and your the mark. Just like Jos. Smith. I have a box right here that you can’t see the contents of but it’s got the best…oops an angel just took it away.
” practice law with her, “”you’re”