Conference Report and Musings: Saturday

Some random musings from LDS General Conference sessions on Saturday...

1) Pres. Hinckley made the bold statement more or less that our church has a higher activity rate than any other church. I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't be true, although of course it depends on your definition of 'activity'. Very few churches can quantify activity statistically other than raw church meeting attendance numbers. I think Pres. Hinckley was talking primarily about Christian churches, as the Eastern 'churches' like Buddhism (more like 'philosophies') don't have any 'church meetings' and don't really require doing anything to be 'active' other than say 'I'm Buddhist'. I would also think Islam has a higher activity rate, if only because the religion has been intertwined with the social culture among Middle East countries so closely, citizens are almost 'active' by default.

2) Pres. Hinckley also mentioned the 'apology' from Illinois over the treatment of the early Saints. On one hand, the apology doesn't really mean much 150 years after the fact (unless they're going to give some of the land back to the Church), but then again, admitting something was a mistake makes it more difficult for that something to happen again...

3) Elder Oakes talked about the Second Coming and mentioned the parable of the ten virgins. He seemed to suggest that the 50/50 split between the prepared and the unprepared virgins was more or less an accurate prediction of the percentage of church members who will actually be ready when the Lord comes, rather than just a convenient split for the purposes of telling the parable. The Baroness asked me what percentage of church members I thought would be 'celestial-worthy' at the end. I would have said less than 50% myself, but we'll see...

4) Pres. Monson sure remembers names well, doesn't he? It seems like he can rattle off the first and last name of any person in his stories, even ones from 30+ years ago. Even if he had to look some of them up again while preparing his talk, it's still impressive (and a subtle lesson too...)

5) Elder Oakes also had an aside lamenting the portrayal of Catholic priests in the media. It's true you rarely see a positive portrayal of priests in movies or TV (a common lament of Steven Greydanus of Decent Films). Mormons don't really get positive portrayals in media either; usually just polygamy jokes for a cheap laugh, or the 'hip' thing nowadays--gay Mormon missionaries! Still, it's not nearly as bad as on the Catholic side, which I'd attribute to the size and visibility of the church, and the extent of the recent scandals. With time, though, we'll see more Mormon characters in movies as more people become familiar with the Church and it's not such an obscure reference (Whether they're positive or negative portrayals remains to be seen).

6) I counted at least three references to 'avoiding debt' and 'living within your means' in Saturday's talks--just as a follow-up from my bankruptcy post last week.

7) Both Elders Maxwell and Holland gave somewhat 'unstructured' talks. Not unstructured in the sense of ad-libbed on the spot, but not quite the same format of the usual {[thesis statement] [doctrine] [doctrine][scripture] [interpretation] [thesis statement #2] [doctrine]...} format conference talks usually take. Both Elder Maxwell's and Elder Hollands talks were more of a random collection of stories and experiences relating to a certain topic. I think this is a very effective way of speaking, and both these talks would probably rank #1-#2 for the day. (Side note: this 'unstructured' way of speaking is also a favorite of Elder John H. Groberg--coincidently called to the Presidency of the Seventy today. Maybe we'll hear from him tomorrow...)

8) Elder Maxwell is still tops on my list of favorite speakers of all time, and has a wonderfully sublime (and underrated) sense of humor. The only problem is the Baroness (a Taiwanese native) has a hard time understanding anything he says...

9) I picked up some topics today for longer comments and essays, but I'll save those for the future. On to tomorrow!

10) Go UCONN!