Nauvoo Neighbor

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 457th week, and we’re covering the Priesthood session of the October 2006 General Conference.

The title of this post comes from mashing together the titles of Elder Christofferson’s talk, Let Us Be Men, with President Hinckley’s, Rise Up, Men of God. We’re going through a crisis of masculinity these days. Richard V. Reeves’s book, “Of Boys and Men” covers this, and a review by David Brooks in the New York Times captures some of the most arresting statistics:

• By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.
• One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labor force. 
• Men account for close to three out of every four “deaths of despair” — suicide and drug overdoses.

As men struggle, some–especially young men–turn to role-models like Andrew Tate. Tate has nearly 10 million followers on X (Twitter) and is the third-most Google person. Tate is a self-described misogynist who is being investigated on suspicion of rape and human trafficking in two different countries (the UK and Romania). Among his other ventures, he  ran Hustler’s University, where 100,000 subscribed to learn Tate’s version of what it means to be a man. 

In the face of the real struggles men, especially young man, the world’s role models only serve to mislead and exacerbate the underlying problems.

Contrast that with the vision of masculinity taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many–especially those who are critical–point out that the Church is highly patriarchal and superficially they are absolutely right. But what kind of patriarchy? What does it mean to be a man, in the eyes of the General Authorities of the Church?

Continue reading “Let Us Be Men of God”

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 456th week, and we’re covering the Saturday afternoon session of the October 2006 General Conference.

Elder Wirthlin started his talk, Sunday Will Come, with he and his future wife’s real life meet cute:

I remember the first time I met her. As a favor to a friend, I had gone to her home to pick up her sister, Frances. Elisa opened the door, and at least for me, it was love at first sight.

I think she must have felt something too, for the first words I ever remember her saying were, “I knew who you was.”

Elisa was an English major.

To this day I still cherish those five words as some of the most beautiful in human language.

He then shared what President Hinckley said at Elisa’s funeral: “it is a devastating, consuming thing to lose someone you love. It gnaws at your soul.” Elder Wirthlin added simply: “He was right. As Elisa was my greatest joy, now her passing is my greatest sorrow.”

Continue reading “The Gentle Light of an Easter Dawn”

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 455th week, and we’re covering the Saturday morning session of the October 2006 General Conference.

When I read Elder David S. Baxter’s talk, Faith, Service, Constancy, I thought I had found the one talk that I would write about from this session. In fact, I was even tempted to skip reading the last three talks of this session (there were eight!) because of how busy I always am. But so far I’ve never done that, and I didn’t want to start now. I’m very glad I didn’t, because Elder M. Russell Ballard’s talk O Be Wise ended up being one of my all-time favorites from the entire General Conference Odyssey so far. 

Continue reading “Life is Hard; Use Common Sense”

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 454th week, and we’re covering the General Young Women session of the April 2006 General Conference.

This was a great session, and it was easy to forget that it was a Young Women session in between the references to the young women in the audience because the lessons were so generally applicable. I especially loved the first talk, “I Am the Light Which Ye Shall Hold Up”, by Sister Tanner.

One theme that often resonates with me is the reminder (which I seem to need to hear again and again and again) that there is a huge gap between what the world appreciates and what matters to the Lord. So when Sister Tanner says “some of us would rather help with hurricane relief than home relief. Now both are important, but home relief is our primary and eternal responsibility,” I’m here for that. It’s something I believe passionately, but is never easy for me to accept. 

Continue reading “He That is Greatest”

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 453rd week, and we’re covering the Sunday afternoon session of the April 2006 General Conference.

It’s not that often that I get so excited by a talk during the General Conference Odyssey that I feel inspired to start live-tweeting it, but that’s exactly what happened when I read Instruments of the Lord’s Peace by Elder Robert S. Wood. It’s hard to believe the talk was given eighteen years ago, because it feels so incredibly relevant to our world today. Truly, this is one of the most prescient talks I’ve ever read, and it starts right in the first paragraph:

Continue reading “May the Lord’s People Be at Peace One with Another”

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 452nd week, and we’re covering the Sunday morning session of the April 2006 General Conference.

I started the General Conference Odyssey back in 2015, and now it’s 2024. That makes this pretty much the longest project I’ve ever worked on in my life. Back when we got started, we were covering General Conference talks from the 1970s, before I was born. Now we’re covering 2006, which is a few years after my mission and for the most part with the General Authorities that I feel like I grew up with, especially President Hinckley.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that I remember these talks. I don’t. I never had a faith crisis or anything like that (not about the Church, anyway), but in the years after my mission I was pretty uninterested in General Conference in particular. While I was on my mission, I would devour the General Conference talks when they came out in the Ensign (as it was called back in the day). Some of it was that I was desperate for anything to read, of course. I’m the kind of person who reads compulsively, up to and including a cereal box if that’s all I’ve got handy. My whole family is like that, pretty much. We’re book people.

But there was more going on than that. I really cared about spiritual things in a deep way on my mission, and so I invested myself in the talks. Before my mission, I’d always watch General Conference with my family on TV, but most of us would inevitably fall asleep, definitely including myself, and it felt like they were always just saying the same things. After my mission, at least for a few years, that’s what I went back to. But during my mission? During my mission I could read the talks and get epiphanies.

It’s like (then) Elder Oaks said in his talk All Men Everywhere in this session: “What we get from a book—especially a sacred text—is mostly dependent on what we take to its reading.”

So I wish that I had memories of listening to these talks back when I was a newlywed and could contrast them with how I feel about them now as a middle-aged dad, but the truth is: if I listened to them at all I have no memory at all. And I’m pretty sure that I would remember, because a talk like President Hinckley’s Seek Ye the Kingdom of God is not one that I would forget.

Continue reading “God Doesn’t Play Zero-Sum Games”