General Conference Odyssey

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I took the title of this talk from the first talk of this session: Elder Vaughn J. Featherstone’s “The Gospel of Jesus Christ Is the Golden Door.” The first half of the talk is primarily about the welfare program, and there were lots of interesting insights there, but then the second half had to do with work. “Brethren,” he said, “there is no substitute for work… The Lord expects us to be industrious; he expects us to be mentally and physically ambitious with all our hearts and souls.”

I like the Mormon emphasis on work, on progress, on self-sufficiency, and on freedom. To me, it is ennobling. Elder Featherstone quoted from a story by Richard Thurman near the end of his talk:

Whenever something in you says, “It’s impossible,” remember to take a careful look and see if it isn’t really God asking you to grow an inch, or a foot, or a mile, that you may come to a fuller life.

And then he made an interesting transition:

Emma Lazarus has written words which describe the great Statue of Liberty. These words have special meaning to us in the Church, for truly these same words entreating all to come to America may well apply to the Church. I will just quote the last few lines. She said:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the golden door, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

This ending is vital to anyone who wants to understand Mormonism, including us Mormons. With all our emphasis on eternal progression and self-sufficiency and pragmatism and work you may start to wonder—and some have certainly criticized—where is there room for grace? Where is there room for God’s mercy and power?

The answer is simple: we believe in both. In a nutshell, that’s why I’m Mormon. Because I believe in the tradition of both. We depend—absolutely and without reservation—on the mercy and grace of God. We are, alone and unassisted, doomed. Nephi’s younger brother Jacob explained that, without the intervention of God, “our spirits must become subject to that angel who fell… and our spirits must have become like him, and we become… angels to a devil.”[ref]2 Nephi 9:8-9[/ref] Alone, we all fall eventually succumb to moral empathy. Even after we are rescued from that fate, King Benjamin taught that “if ye should serve [God] with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.”[ref]Mosiah 2:21[/ref] There is no question: we cannot save ourselves.

And yet the question becomes: after we are saved through divine intervention, then what? That’s when the call for mental and spiritual ambition comes into play. It’s not a question of inventing our own rescue plan. It’s a question of what God calls on us to do with the plan that He put in place. The golden door is His. We just have to walk through it.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• A Global United Brotherhood by Daniel Ortner
• The Priesthood Power of the Relief Society by Jan Tolman
• Some great thing by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I have to start out by saying: I loved this session. Definitely one of my favorite sessions since I started this Odyssey almost a year ago. There were quotable, thought-provoking lines in every single talk, starting with LeGrand Richards’ defense of eternal marriage in Revealed Truths of the Gospel, when he said:

Personally I would just as soon believe that death was a complete annihilation of both body and spirit as to think that I would have to live on forever and forever without a continuation of the love ties that bind my wife and me together, and our family and our loved ones here in this life. Heaven will only be a projection of our life here.

The last sentence—“heave will only be a projection of our life here”—is a pretty common sentiment, I think. If you haven’t heard that exact quote, you’ve heard one like it. But the earlier statement was more personal and much more arresting. It’s one thing to have a theological commitment to eternal families. It’s another to have such a visceral loyalty and love of the ideal that you’d prefer to walk into the abyss than live alone forever.

But Sterling W. Sil had even more eye-brow raising comments in his talk: A Fortune to Share. It was full of funny, irreverent real talk. “Someone has pointed out that if there is anyone who can’t buy happiness with money,” he stated, “it must be that he just doesn’t know where to shop.” And later: “Someone said, ‘Money ain’t everything,’ and his friend said, ‘Just name me three things that it ain’t.’” Funny lines for a General Conference talk, like I said, but in both cases he had a serious point to make. After the “he just doesn’t know where to shop” line, Elder Sil said:

We can build temples with money, we can send out missionaries with money, we can erect educational institutions, operate hospitals, and pay our tithing with money. We can feed and clothe our families with money, and in many ways we can build up the kingdom of God with money.

That’s not a joke. That’s just stone-cold pragmatism. And there are very few things I love more in life than someone who takes a look at realism, takes a look at idealism, and then says, “I’ll take both.” I’ll admit: I’m a little biased here. I have a pretty cynical view of academics and intellectuals and pundits because so often the emphasis is on rhetoric instead of substance, novelty instead of accuracy, provocation instead of truth. But that doesn’t mean I accept being pragmatic instead of being idealistic. I want both. I think a life well lived is, in many ways, a long series of stubborn refusals to abandon either one. To strive for idealism and efficacy is to live a life of integrity, never giving up on the battle to bring the two into correspondence.

And then after the “name three things it ain’t” joke, he went on to say:

Money is preserved labor, it is industry made negotiable, it is stored up accomplishment. It is the medium of exchange that we can trade for things that we can take with us and a great many of them we can actually send on ahead. We can take our families with us. We can take our education with us. We can take our great character qualities with us. And money is the medium that we can use to share the treasures of the earth with others who need our help.

I have to tell you that—as an economist—I swooned.

I haven’t included all the lines from this talk that are funny and yet also profound. There are more. Go read it yourself and you will find them.

Next up was Eldred G. Smith’s talk: Opposition in Order to Strengthen Us. Once again, not a really new theme, but definitely a lot more philosophical than I would have expected in a General Conference talk. Elder Smith goes right into the idea of the Fortunate Fall. In traditional Christian thinking, the Fall is only fortunate in that it provided an opportunity for God’s grace. That would be like saying that a car accident was fortunate because it let a surgeon use their full talents to save your life. It’s not what Mormons have in mind. For us, the Fall wasn’t just a terrible mistake with a grand resolution, but in itself was fortunate:

Adam and Eve had been in a state of stagnation: no progress—no growth—no reproduction. Without a change, they would have remained in that state forever. It was necessary for a change to take place.

The Fall is fortunate, for Mormons, because it was the only way to break the impasse of stagnation and allow us the possibility of growth and development. And—just as with Elder Sil’s comments—there’s a lot more in this talk I wish everyone would read. But I’m going to move on.

William H. Bennett’s talk began with one of those really emotional stories that we often hear in talks. The problem with those stories is that most of them we’ve already heard a million times. But, in “Which Way to Shore?”, Elder Bennett shared one that was new to me. I’m not going to share it. You’ll have to read it. Here is the passage I’ll share instead:

Let me say, my brothers and sisters, that if we want to save individuals, to save the souls of our Father’s children, we must be willing to get involved and to help others get involved in meaningful ways also.

We are addicted to grand, abstract, technical policy solutions. A blog post I’ve been nursing along for several months without finishing talks about this directly. The simple version? Ever since the rise of science and rationality we have grown to view the world as a machine (instead of, for example, a garden) and our role in it as mechanics (instead of gardeners). We have little patience for slow, indirect work, for subtlety and preservation. Instead, we see problems and we want solutions. And sometimes this is possible, but often times it’s not. What’s more, however, is that it tends towards a kind of impersonal charity, and that’s a thing that can never be. There’s truth to the stereotype that we’d rather raise taxes, have the government distribute the goods, and consider poverty “solved” than reach out to people in our neighborhoods or wards who need our help. Not policies and programs and bureaucracies, but personal involvement. And that’s what Elder Bennett’s talk reminded me of.

Next up was A. Theodore Tuttle’s The Role of Fathers, and I think I highlighted about 25% of that talk. One of the passages cut a little close to home for me:

There is yet another intrusion into the home that needs to be mentioned. It is an unwise father who carries to his family his daily business cares. They disturb the peace existing there. He should leave his worries at the office and enter his home with the spirit of peace in his heart and with the love of God burning within him.

This makes sense, but it presupposes that a father has an office where he can leave those business cares. Other than business meetings, I work from home 100% of the time. My office was a standing desk in the dining room in our last house. I have a designated room in this house, which is nice, but it’s still in the home. This is one of those times where I’m going to have to think about how best to apply the principle to my particular situation. And it’s one I need to work on. I often work much more than 8 hours in a day and—when the kids are on summer break especially—it is incredibly hard for me to successfully separate my work time from family time without being stressed and without projecting that stress onto my kids, which they don’t deserve. I’m working on it. Because I’d also like to live up to this injunction:

Fathers, draw close to your children. Learn to communicate. Learn to listen. This means giving a father’s most valuable commodity—time!… To the extent we become friends with our children in unconditional love, to that extent we become like our Heavenly Father.

The last talk in the session was from (then) Elder Ezra Taft Benson: Prepare Ye. The talk didn’t hit me as hard, spiritually, but it was definitely interesting for me to read the calls to food-storage and self-reliance that so heavily influenced my parents and, through them, shaped a lot of my childhood. Like a lot of Mormons out there, we had beds made out of a mattress on top of a sheet of plywood on top of dozens of buckets of wheat. Just as with Elder Tuttle’s talk, there’s also a lot one in this for me to live up to.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Fatten the Pig by G
• The Last Days: “Watch and Be Sober” by Jan Tolman
• A Fixed Point by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I didn’t really understand the sadness other Mormons felt when Ezra Taft Benson passed away in 1994, but their obvious connection to the then President made me look forward to feeling the same kind of bond with the next man to take up that mantle: Howard W. Hunter. Sadly, his tenure lasted less than a year, and virtually all I remember is that his unofficial them was temples.

So it was particularly interesting to me that the talk that struck me the most from the Saturday morning session of the October 1973 General Conference was (1) by Elder Hunter and (2) not directly about temples at all. Instead, in Of the World or of the Kingdom?, he talked about the conflicts between the unchanging gospel and the transient philosophies and institutions of late 20^th century America.

The warnings were familiar. For example:

In this day of increased knowledge, higher thought, and a modernization of the old, the simple has been overlooked and the profound sought after. The basic, simple, fundamental truths of the gospel are being ignored.

Still, Elder Hunter’s specific views on the topic were like a unique improvisation on a familiar theme, with different emphases and nuances than what other leaders have said before. This is important, because we have to see the differences in order to recognize the commonalities, and the commonalities are the most important aspects of the General Conference talks.[ref]This is a fundamental reason for having the General Conference Odyssey in the first place: you can’t spot the commonalities and differences without a large sample size to work with![/ref]

So, here’s one paragraph that struck me as worth paying particular attention to:

I believe we can be modern and enjoy the fruits of a modern world and its high standard of living, and I believe we can have the benefits of modern scholarship and scientific advances without turning to the theories of the modernist. I believe the principles of the gospel announced by the Savior in his personal ministry were true when they were given and are true today. Truth is eternal and never changing, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is ever contemporary in a changing world.

I like the optimism here, and the dogged insistence that being “not of this world” doesn’t entail abdicating either the blessing of a “scientific advances” or “modern scholarship.” The tension between religious believers (of all traditions) and the larger society often leads to monasticism in one form or another, but Mormonism aims to engage with the world, not withdraw from it. It’s just up to us, I think, to articulate why and how “the gospel of Jesus Christ is ever contemporary.”[ref]As an aside, defining modernity is tricky. I’m used to the definition that says the early modern period started in the 1500s and the late modern period ended well before World War II (Wikipedia), which would make the 1970s post-modern instead of modern. But that’s not about right or wrong, just about consistency.[/ref]

And here’s another paragraph, near the end of the talk, that I liked a lot:

The knowledge explosion of which the world is so proud is not of man’s creation. It is his discovery of portions of the unlimited knowledge and information which is part of God’s knowledge. How we use it is determined by whether we are of the eternal kingdom of God or a part of the temporary understanding of the world. The question is simply this: are we seeking to find our place in the world in the realm of worldly thought, or are we seeking to find our place in the unchanging kingdom of God?

I’m definitely looking forward to reading more talks by President Hunter and getting to know better a leader that was not with us for long enough for me to get to know him in life.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• What Message Would Christ Share With Us Today? by Daniel Ortner
• How Wonderful It Is to Me! by Jan Tolman
• Grace to Grace by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I want to start this post by pulling out a few quotes from different talks that were given during the Friday afternoon session of the October 1973 General Conference

The Church has constantly stressed the importance of the home.

– There Is Need for Repentance by ElRay Christiansen

As children of God, we cannot afford to forget our origin and destiny if we desire the realms of celestial glory.

– The Path to Eternal Life by Delbert L. Stapley

[O]ne cannot forget mother and remember God. One cannot remember mother and forget God. Why? Because these two sacred persons, God and mother, partners in creation, in love, in sacrifice, in service, are as one.

– “Behold Thy Mother” by Thomas S. Monson

I believe the second two quotes explain the first. “The Church has constantly stressed the importance of the home.” Why?

More often than not—among members and non-members alike—I think the answer is a kind of superficial association of Mormonism with good, old-fashioned, American values. Part of the history of our faith is that after brutal persecution and a period of hostile, mutual alienation, the Church worked incredibly hard to integrate into American culture and society. So Mormons are so family-centric because families are part of American values, and Mormons (at least in America) bought into the whole American dream from apple pies to patriotism to capitalism to family values.

I’m not saying that the pendulum swing between alienation and integration isn’t real, but I will say it obscures the fact that Mormonism’s emphasis on family goes much, much deeper. Our commitment to the ideals of family and home is not an affectation, it is at the core of our theology and central to our concept of life on Earth and in eternity.

The origin and destiny that Elder Stapley refers to are impossible to separate from family. We came from a home, a home where we had a loving Heavenly Father and a loving Heavenly Mother. Family and home are central to our origin. We are headed back home, to live with our Heavenly Parents again and—through the grace of Christ—to become them. Family and home are central to our destiny.

Elder (at the time) Monson’s paragraph is one that I can’t stop thinking about because it is such an arresting violation of the parallel that you expect. “God and mother,” not Heavenly Mother but earthly mothers, are “partners in creation, in love, in sacrifice, in service” and are “as one.”

I think I’ll be working through the implications of this one for a long time, but what we can say immediately is that—once again—the entire Plan of Salvation is inseparable from the concept of home and family and that includes our sacred obligation here on Earth to emulate to the best we can the heavenly home we don’t even remember.

We’re members of the house of God. And here we are on Earth—blind, fallible, and broken—playing at house. Playing at god. Nothing could be more absurd. Nothing could be more serious.

I’ll leave with one more quote:

The Spirit of the Lord will not dwell nor abide in a home where there is constant bickering, quarreling, arguing, discord, or disharmony… A happy Home is where the wife is treated like a queen and the husband is treated like a king.

– There Is Need for Repentance by ElRay Christiansen

If that is the aspiration we’re striving for down here, then we can also understand this much about our hidden heavenly home: that’s what it was like. We all know that there was discord in Heaven on at least one occasion, but our home before this life was defined as a place where “[Heavenly Mother] is treated like a queen and [Heavenly Father] is treated like a kind.” That is how they regard each other. That is how they treat each other. That is the first home that we knew.

In those rare, beautiful moments of transient bliss when pure family love and harmony are revealed for a moment or two through a mundane, everyday experience, eternity itself is laid bare before us.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• “Marriage Brings Adjustments” by Walker Wright
• Love One Another by Jan Tolman
• Walk in newness by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

President Harold B. Lee kicked off the October 1973 General Conference with a talk on Friday morning called Understanding Who We Are Brings Self-Respect. The talk was not what I expected at all. “My beloved brothers and sisters and friends who are listening by radio and television, may I now for a few moments make some comments about a condition which is of great concern to all of us today,” he began. And of course, you’re expecting something about wickedness. And, in a way, you’d be right. But he expressed it in a way that certainly brought me up short: “the shocking lack of self-respect.”

I stopped and thought for a while at the end of the first paragraph. And I decided it did make sense. After all, one of the examples of this lack of self-respect was “permissiveness.” As a parent, it’s easy to understand that just allowing your kids to do whatever they want is not a sign of love, or of respect, or of regard for them as human beings. As a parent, if you care for your kids than you try to erect structure and boundaries and routines to keep them healthy, to keep them safe, and to help them learn and grow. Discipline is a sign of regard. If for children, then why not for the self?

And if that’s true, than the kind of person who indulges in sating their every whim and desire is not, after all, acting out of high self-regard. They are, perversely, respecting their appetites at the expense of respecting their true selves.

So the talk won me over, but I couldn’t help but remain surprised all the same. At some points, the language about self-respect almost seemed Randian: the archest of right-wing avatars. And yet within paragraphs a quote like “The first thing to be done to help a man to moral regeneration is to restore if possible his self-respect,” would seem as bleeding-heart as they come. The talk even includes the phrase–not as common in the 1970s as it later became, I think–“self-esteem.”

It’s just another solid reminder that prophets–when they are speaking as prophets–don’t see the world the way we see it. We interpret the world according to our preconceptions and assumptions, and that means we can’t help but see what happens around us as part of a pre-existing narrative. Our politics, our tastes, our personal histories: none of us can prevent these things from traveling outside of ourselves and becoming a part of our perception of the outside world.

Prophets are human, too, and they have the same limitations. But when a prophet prophecies, I believe they catch a hold of a different vision and step outside of their individual perspectives. I think that’s part of what makes them so hard to understand, not to mention disconcerting. It’s also what makes them so important to listen to.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Loving Patriarchy by G
• Forgiveness, Boundaries, and Reconciliation by Walker Wright
• The Importance of Righteous Influence by Jan Tolman
• Channels by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

We’re covering the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1973 General Conference today, which means the General Conference Odyssey is wrapping up its fifth conference. There currently 51 general conferences on line—and two more get added every year—so you can see why we call this an “odyssey.”

The first and last talks from this session stayed with me. In the first talk, Elder Mark E. Petersen taught that “salvation comes through the Church” and that as a consequence, “if persons separate themselves from the Lord’s church, they thereby separate themselves from his means of salvation.”

This is one of those hard teachings for someone like me. I’ve never been a full-out spiritualist—the kind of person who says, “Why go to Church when you go be in nature?”—because it does makes sense to me that a religious life should be a communal life. We’re social animals. It’s in our (I believe) God-given nature to exist only in relationships with others. Whether or not you meet in a building is irrelevant, but meeting in groups is not. And, at its heart, that’s what the Church is: a group of people.

But the Church is also “a house of order,”[ref]D&C 109:8[/ref] and that’s the part with which I never feel comfortable. I have a problem with authority, and I don’t like large institutions. I don’t trust governments, I hate working for big companies, and I try to stay as far away from SLC and leadership callings of any description as I possibly can. I don’t want to have one myself, and I try to fly under the radar so that the people who do have them will basically leave me alone. As long as “order” is synonymous with “hierarchy,” it seems that my membership in the Church is going to be tinged with unease.[ref]Just to be clear: This is not a faith crisis. This is just life.[/ref]

President Harold B. Lee’s talk means a lot to me in this regard. It is called “Stand Ye in Holy Places,” which is a pretty profound way to make the point that I made earlier: for a group of people to share a cause and a faith they have to have a point (literal or metaphorical) at which they come together. As long as religions are communal, religions must have shared, holy places.

President Lee also makes this interesting point:

I call your attention to one of these requirements [of baptism], particularly that which has been stressed by direct and indirect words in this conference: “are willing to bear one another’s burdens that they may be light.” If I were to ask you what is the heaviest burden one may have to bear in this life, what would you answer? The heaviest burden that one has to bear in this life is the burden of sin. How do you help one to bear that great burden of sin, in order that it might be light?

What this tells me is that even our most personal struggles—our wrestles with our sins and weaknesses—can and should be communal in a sense. We should trust each other, help each other, and rely on each other.

President Lee made two more statements that I’m not sure are connected, but that I have not forgotten. First, he said “You cannot lift another soul until you are standing on higher ground than he is.” That’s another one of those statements that can grate on modern sensibility. When I was a kid I played a card game called Legend of the Five Rings. The game came with its own make-believe religion and spiritual text, the Tao of Shinsei, and I loved one of the quotes from that make-believe spiritual book from a card game for nerds: “One must bow to offer aid to a fallen man.” It’s a quote that hits the notes of egalitarianism and humility. It’s easy to love. President Lee’s quote, by contrast, does not have the same connotations. But it’s certainly just as true. You can’t help up someone who has fallen if you fall down next to them. Bowing is fine, falling over isn’t. Or, as President Lee said in his second quote, “You cannot light a fire in another soul unless it is burning in your own soul.”

So here are my two points:

First, the hard teachings are the most important teachings. What good is a religion that is comfortable in every way? It could, by definition, offer you no potential for growth. Being challenged by your own religion is not a bug. It’s a feature. We are disciples only to the extent that we are allowing an outside set of principles to act as a discipline on our lives.

Second, I don’t really understand why order requires hierarchy. I’m a complex systems guy. I’m all about emergence and spontaneous order. So I don’t really understand the leap from the necessity of having a Church—a group of people coordinating with each other to aid and support one another—to having a top-down, hierarchical institution like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I don’t get it.

But the goal of reuniting the human family is one I passionately believe in and I’m willing to get with the program based on faith. I don’t know why this is the road we have to take, but I know that the destination is where I want to be and I trust in God that He knows what He’s doing. And so, comfortably or not, I’m along for this ride.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• The Source of Salvation by Daniel Ortner
• “As I Am” by Walker Wright
• Without A Doubt by Jan Tolman
• Relaying God’s Love by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Elder Marion G. Romney’s talk, Man—A Child of God, dove straight into some very Mormon teachings: “The truth I desire to emphasize today is that we mortals are in very deed the literal offspring of God.”

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accept this concept as a basic doctrine of their theology. The lives of those who have given it thought enough to realize its implications are controlled by it; it gives meaning and direction to all their thoughts and deeds. This is so because they know that it is the universal law of nature in the plant, animal, and human worlds for reproducing offspring to reach in final maturity the likeness of their parents.

They reason that the same law is in force with respect to the offspring of God. Their objective is, therefore, to someday be like their heavenly parents.

The emphasis on becoming like our Heavenly Parents is one of Mormonism’s most distinctive and controversial beliefs. Because it is so easy to misinterpret, we are often rather sensitive about it, and we take pains to point out that the belief has solid basis in scripture.

“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,” wrote Paul, “that we are the children of God.”[ref]Romans 8:16[/ref] Referring to Psalm 82, which states “ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most High,”[ref]Psalms 82:6[/ref] Jesus asked, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”[ref]John 10:34[/ref]

We also often emphasize that early Christians held similar beliefs. I have a few quotes from an old PowerPoint presentation that my father put together years ago:

• “Let the interpretation of the Psalm [82] be just as you wish, yet thereby it is demonstrated that all men are deemed worthy of becoming gods.” – Justin Martyr
• “Yea, I say, the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.” – Clement of Alexandria
• “The Word was made flesh in order that we might be enabled to be made gods.” – Athansius
• “But he himself that justifies also deifies, for by justifying he makes sons of God. ―For he has given them power to become the sons of God‖ [John 1:12]. If then we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods.” – Augustine

This is a good approach, but as I read Elder Romney’s talk, I had a different thought, which is this: How can we know our own theology if we don’t read these talks? What I mean by that is simply that I’ve seen fairly frequent debates about which beliefs are really doctrinal, which beliefs are core and essential, and frequently those debates refer to the Standard Works. And that is right and proper, but it is not enough.

If we believe in an open canon; if we believe in continuing revelation; if we believe that we are led by prophets, seers, and revelators (i.e. if we believe what we say we do), then the question of marking out the contours and landmarks of our faith is not an intellectual exercise for academics and scholars. It is a question of divine authority.

I’ll give you one specific example: there are those Mormons who take a very dim view of The Family: A Proclamation to the World. They will tell you that it is not canon (which, in fairness, is true), that it was written by lawyers, and so forth to argue that it’s not really Mormon. All well and good as intellectual debates go, but this is what I say in reply: go and start reading the General Conference talks and see how consistently, how prominently, how steadfastly the family is preached. You can’t go one session, it often seems, without at least a couple of paragraphs about the family as it relates to God’s plan for us. Any unbiased reader of the General Conference talks who was asked to list the most important topics would, without any ambiguity, list Jesus Christ and the Atonement first, and then families second. In that context, the critiques of The Family ring hollow.

As a Church that professes to be led by continuous, dynamic revelation it is impossible to understand our own faith without paying close attention to the ongoing stream of teachings. The Standard Works are the roots and foundation of our doctrine, but the branches and leaves are the General Conference talks.

And so, to return to Elder Romney’s talk, the idea “that man is a child of God is the most important knowledge available to mortals.” He concluded by bearing his own witness that “I know that I am a son of God, and that you, my beloved listeners, are individually a son or a daughter of God, and that this knowledge implemented in our lives will lift us back into his presence through the atoning sacrifice of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Knowing that we are Children of God by Daniel Ortner
• One Simple Sentence by Jan Tolman
• Conception by Marilyn Nielson