Thoughts on General Conference

Tonight for Family Home Evening I gave a lesson on solemn assemblies. I had actually prepared it for FHE two weeks ago, but we went to the missionaries' FHE that night because Sister Southwick, one of our incredible sister missionaries was going home later that week. (I don't know why we didn't do it last week.)

I found an interesting article about apostolic succession, and it discussed the fact that John Taylor was the one who institutionalized voting by quorums and groups as a procedure for sustaining a new president of the Church. The authors speculated that since President Taylor had only become the senior apostle two years before Brigham Young's death (when it was decided that seniority should be determined by continuous service, thus moving Taylor and Wilford Woodruff ahead of Orson Hyde--who had been dropped from the Quorum for about 2 months in 1839--and Orson Pratt--who was excommunicated in 1842 and out of the Church for 5 months before being re-baptized and returned to the Quorum) that he wanted a way to clearly establish his position. The procedure that was used for the solemn assembly to sustain John Taylor was used for every subsequent president of the Church until Ezra Taft Benson. For the sustaining of President Benson, the procedure was shortened and simplified--perhaps in part because the time when a large majority of the Church could be assembled together at Temple Square had passed.

Far and away my favorite talk from Conference was President Uchtdorf's on the Faith of our Fathers. One of my mission companions was a convert from Canada, and his ancestors were all Orthodox from Ukraine and Poland. He said he was never quite sure what to make of the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers" since for him that was Orthodoxy! And, it has always been interesting to me that the hymn was written by an Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholicism, and the wrote the hymn about England returning to the faith of its fathers--Catholicism: see the original third verse. President Uchtdorf's talk contained several wonderful interpretations of what the faith of our (Latter-day Church) fathers/(natural) fathers/(historic spiritual) fathers/(Heavenly) Father is: each was better than the last! It was made all the more powerful by the fact that President Uchtdorf--the first apostle called whose family was not part of the gathering to the American West--was the one to give it.

There were many wonderful talks--more than usual it seems--but my two other favorites were Elder Holland, fast becoming the latest great Mormon theologian and doing a great job of it, and Elder Wickman (yes, I am biased since he is the General Counsel of the Church, but I challenge you to find a more beautifully-written talk--President Hinckley's excepted--that has been given in recent years in Conference). And, on a related note, I have always thought that Elder Christofferson was an amazing writer and thinker; two of my favorites of his are here, and here.

Finally, I must note that an Area Seventy was called from Kharkov, Ukraine, where I served on my mission. He has been serving as District President. In the former Soviet Union there are now two Area Seventies in Ukraine (clearly a sign of its overwhelming spiritual and geopolitical significance), one in Russia (also called at the most recent conference), and one in Estonia.

P.S. I had written some of my thoughts about the solemn assembly, but it just doesn't seem appropriate to post them on a blog--too personal. Maybe I am old fashioned.

P.P.S. I learned how to put links in my posts! It is a new era for the Blair Family Blog.