Showing all posts by Ziff

In GA's, Statistics

Dieter F. Uchtdorf seems likely to become Church president

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

Jeffrey R. Holland passed away over the weekend. As you know if you’ve read ZD for any length of time, one analysis I’ve done repeatedly is looking at who among the Q15 might become Church president. President Holland’s death looks like it really clears the way for Dieter F. Uchtdorf to reach the top spot. I pointed out when I looked at the question about a decade ago that then-Elder Holland was by far the biggest obstacle to him, as they were very close in age (born about a month apart in 1940), but Uchdorf was two spots lower in the line of succession.

To look at the question more systematically, I updated the analysis I’ve done a number of times, using a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries and a bunch of random number draws to simulate possible orders in which the Q15 members die, and as a result who among them becomes Church president and for how long. If you’re interested in a more detailed description of the method, see my 2023 post, although note that I’m now doing the simulation with monthly steps rather than annual steps.

Here are the predicted probabilities by future year. These are actually straight from calculations on the mortality table, and don’t depend on the simulation.

Uchdorf’s curve is still dwarfed by Bednar’s, but for the first time since I started doing this type of analysis, there’s a period of time when he’s the single most likely member to be holding the top spot. Also, this analysis uses the same mortality table for every quorum member, so it doesn’t account for the evident frailty of both Presidents Oaks and Eyring.

Read More

In Statistics

Where in Africa is the Church growing faster or slower?

Author ZiffPosted on

Last month, I wrote a post using Church-published membership data (generously scraped and shared by latter_data_saint on Reddit) to look at which US states have seen more or less growth—or even shrinkage—in the years before and since the pandemic began in early 2020. Today I’m looking at the same data for countries in Africa. I apologize for my slowness; I was never the most productive of bloggers, and the holiday season makes me even slower.

I prepared the data the same way as I did with the US data. You’ll remember, of course, the caveat about how these are reported membership counts, so active membership is likely to be quite a bit lower. Also, the growth rate has been so much faster in Africa than in the US that I used different bin boundaries for the growth colors to be able to show some differences. Here’s the pre-pandemic growth rate by country.

Read More

In Church Policy, Fun

Increase, decrease; To-may-to, to-mah-to

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

The Church announced a few days ago that the Saturday night session of General Conference will be dropped. You probably remember that this was a Nelson-era change from 2021 that was promptly reversed a few months later. I guess only time will tell whether the change sticks this time. I’m guessing it will, because it does kind of suggest that Dallin H. Oaks might have pushed for the change initially, and much like how Russell M. Nelson clearly filed away his distaste for the term “Mormon” back in 1990 after being overruled by Gordon B. Hinckley, he filed this idea away when President Nelson changed course and reinstated it. Well, either that or he spun the Saturday Night Session Selector and a helpful angel who was passing by carefully got it stuck on “no session.”

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

What makes me laugh about the announcement is that it’s so terse (30 words, nine of which are used just in spelling out the full name of the Church), but it comes with a headline that frames it as an increase: “Church Increases Focus on Four Daytime Sessions of General Conference.” Only the subtitle admits, “Saturday evening session will no longer be held.” This sounds to me a lot like the double-speak marketing nonsense that comes out of large corporations. “Congratulations! We’re expanding the benefits of our product or service to include this tiny irrelevant thing!” Then, buried in the footnotes, “We’re also ending this key feature that everyone loved.” (This isn’t to suggest that everyone loved the Saturday night session. Just that the doublespeak is similar.)

This framing inspires me to think of other changes the Church has made or could make, and how they could be reframed using similar doublespeak.

2020: Ensign and New Era archives are available on the Church website going back to 1971! (Both magazines are to be discontinued under their current names.)

Read More

In Statistics

Where in the US is the Church growing vs. shrinking?

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

For over a decade, the Church has published membership counts by country (and by US state, and Canadian province, and counts of units, and other various and sundry items) on its website. Over at the Mormon subreddit, a generous person who goes by the charming name latter_data_saint has scraped all the past data from the Internet Archive and made it available for perusal by any interested parties. And you can bet I’m an interested party, so I’ve taken a look.

In this post, I just wanted to look at US states, at which ones have membership growing more or less quickly, or even shrinking. From latter_data_saint’s data, I pulled out three data points for each state (and Washington, DC): the oldest value, the last value before the pandemic (which turned out to be late 2019), and the most recent value. Then I used these to calculate for each state the annual growth rate pre-pandemic (2012-2019) and post-pandemic (2019-2025). Of course you’ll want to keep in mind the usual caveats about how stated Church membership is going to be far higher than actual counts of posteriors in pews.

Warning: You might want to skip this paragraph if too much math makes your eyes glaze over. I got the annual growth rate from the total growth rate by just taking the yth root of one plus the total growth rate, where y is the number of years apart between first and last value, and subtracting one. For example, if the total growth rate were 10% for a particular state, and the values were seven years apart, then I would take the 7th root of 1+10% (or in other words, raise 1+10% to the power of 1/7), which works out to 1.014, so subtracting one gives a 1.4% annual growth rate. This means 1.4% annual growth over seven years gives 10% total growth: (1+1.4%)^7 = 1.10.

Here’s pre-pandemic growth.

California was alone in actually having a negative growth rate over the period. Texas and North Dakota had the fastest growth, and there was also some relatively strong growth in the old Confederacy, other than Mississippi. (Note that I excluded two states and DC for having a small number of members.)

Read More

In GA's, Statistics

The Church will more likely than not have its first non-American president since John Taylor by 2046

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

Gérald Caussé was called into the Q12 on Thursday to fill the vacancy left by Russell M. Nelson’s passing. Elder Caussé was born in France, making him the third called Q12 member in a row to have been born outside the US (following Ulisses Soares and Patrick Kearon). The Church has only had one president born outside the US, John Taylor, who was born in England in 1808. With this group of three, especially following after German-born Dieter F. Uchtdorf, the question is how soon we might see another.

To answer this question, I ran a little simulation like I have a bunch of times before (most recently in this post). I performed 10,000 random number draws for each Q15 member, and compared them to survival probabilities for each future month based on a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries to get each man’s 10,000 estimated remaining lifespans. Then, using the established rule that the senior living Q15 member becomes president when the president dies, I found how likely it was (i.e., in how many simulated futures) for each man to become Church president. In this simulation, I added an extra check, which is in how many simulations a non-American-born Q15 member became president, and when in those simulations it happened.

This first graph shows the result for this last question: the probability of at least one non-American-born Q15 member becoming president by each date in the future. (In case it isn’t clear, the dates are in YYYYMM format.) There’s an early probability bump in the 2030s, when Elder Uchtdorf has a good probability (and as I’ve noted before, probably better than this analysis suggests, given Jeffrey R. Holland’s ill health), and then a later increase in the 2040s when the three most recently called members have a good chance, especially as a group and given they’re in seniority order right after each other. As you can see, I’ve noted the month when the probability crosses over 50%, near the end of 2046. Note that the simulation goes out 60 years even though the graph only shows the first 30.

Read More

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2025

Author ZiffPosted on 25 Comments

Fastest hymn: In Hymns of Praise, Sunday afternoon
Slowest hymn: None stood out.
Best hymn: I really enjoyed hearing good choirs sing hymns that are often just sung as congregational hymns in the middle of a session. High on the Mountain Top, How Firm a Foundation, and Come, Come, Ye Saints were all excellent.
Worst hymn: Let’s please not sing the self-congratulatory We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet anymore.
Hymn so bouncy that I’m surprised it’s in our hymnbook or allowed at Conference: Standing on the Promises. Note that this isn’t a complaint; I liked the hymn.

Longest prayer: 146 seconds, I. Raymond Egbo, Saturday evening benediction
Shortest prayer: 42 seconds, Christophe G. Giraud-Carrier, Saturday afternoon invocation
Worst prayer: I typically don’t comment on the content of prayers, but I just had to mention Jörg Klebingat’s invocation Saturday evening, where he not only had to remind God of President Oaks’s full name, Dallin Harris Oaks (as though God might get mixed up about which Dallin H. Oaks he was praying for), but also repeated the ridiculous condescending trope that behind every good man is an even better woman. Riiiight. That’s why they can’t be ordained.

Longest talk: 1974 words, D. Todd Christofferson
Shortest talk: 1242 words, Matthew S. Holland

Best visual aids: I enjoyed Gerrit W. Gong’s pictures of him visiting church groups in different places. I especially liked this one where he’s shaking hands with a line of people, including a young man who not only isn’t wearing a white shirt, but is wearing a black shirt and a white tie! I appreciate the young man’s subversion of Mormon norms.

Read More

In Church Policy, GA's

Nine things I’m curious to see about the Oaks presidency

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments
Image source: Wikimedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
  • Who will he choose as his counselors? Will Henry B. Eyring be given a break in his declining years, or is he in for life? Will President Oaks choose some fellow lawyers (step right up, Elders Cook and Christofferson!) or avoid them? More importantly, will he choose some fellow hardliners, or select at least one more compassionate voice to advise him? I think this will strongly signal the direction he wants to steer the Church. Contrast a presidency with Elders Bednar and Andersen as counselors versus one with Elders Uchtodorf (unlikely, I know, but a guy can dream!) and Gong, for example. Or what if he called Elders Soares and Kearon, not only from the junior end, but also not Americans? How cool would that be?
  • Perhaps an even bigger question is who he’ll call to round out the Q12. I do a bad job of keeping track of the likely candidates, but of course there are more fundamentalist and more liberal possibilities. (If you’re interested, here’s a W&T post where a guest poster looks at possibilities and suggests it will be Gérald Caussé.) Again, his pick will signal where he sees the Church going, and although I fear he’d prefer a hardliner, I was very pleasantly surprised by President Nelson’s selection of Patrick Kearon, so I guess you never know.

Read More

In GA's, Statistics

Church President Probabilities with Dallin H. Oaks in the Top Spot

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

As you no doubt have heard, Russell M. Nelson passed away over the weekend, at the age of 101. A friend messaged me quickly to ask what this meant for probabilities of reaching the top spot for all the other Q15 members, so I thought I’d update the analysis I’ve done periodically.

This graph shows future probabilities for each Q15 member. As when I’ve done this before, I used a mortality table produced by the Society of Actuaries to create it. For details on the method, see the “Method” section of my 2023 post on this question. One update I continued from my 2024 post is to do the calculations for each month in the future rather than for each year. In addition, I fixed an error that DaveW pointed out last year where I was cutting off the calculations too early for the younger Q15 members by only going out 30 years, so this time I went out 60 years even though the graph only shows 30 because that’s the period where most of the action is.

 

Read More

In Church Life, GA's

GA Preferences

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

Image credit: josephvm on Pixabay

General Conference is a couple of weeks away. We’ll get to hear a lot about the covenant path and the One True Church and certainly some mentions of the Most Correct of Any Book. But we also might get to hear a few tidbits about GAs’ idiosyncratic preferences. For example, Dallin H. Oaks thinks it’s very important that we take the sacrament with our right hands. And someone (I’m guessing Russell M. Nelson) is running a campaign to get temples rebranded as “houses of the Lord.”

How much time or effort should we spend trying to tease out these sometimes idiosyncratic GA preferences from the core of the gospel, things like the Two Great Commandments, the atonement and so forth? I feel like I’ve spent far too much mental energy in my life on this task. I thought it was worthwhile, though, because I figured, and certainly heard lots of people say, that you could just ignore those tangential personal preferences of individual GAs and just hold to the core of the gospel.

But here’s my problem: It’s often unclear where one ends and the other begins. Read More

In Church Policy

How the Church could change

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

How can the Church change? This is often a question on my mind, as there are so many things I’d like to see changed, such as ordaining women, for example. To say the Church is resistant to change would be an understatement. And even more so, it resists the public perception that it could be changed by outside pressure. But of course it does change all the time. These changes are always framed as just new ways of doing the same fundamental things, though. As Steve Taysom said so well in his biography of Joseph F. Smith,

Successful religions, meaning those that are historically persistent, find ways to make necessary changes to remain viable within a given cultural and historical context while simultaneously explaining away the changes as nonexistent, unimportant, or as epiphenomena that are changes in appearance only, and which are actually in service of a larger, unchanging phenomenon.

Image by Augusto Ordóñez from Pixabay. This guy looks younger than most GAs, but I love his look of annoyance. I’m imagining him reading this post and saying “No, Ziff. We never change.”

Reading articles for my last post on modesty rhetoric, I was pleasantly surprised that several of them waved away past teachings on modesty as being 100% about clothing. But I was also kind of amazed that they so obviously elided where those past teachings came from. Here’s an example from a 2019 New Era article:

When you hear the word modesty, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Probably a list of clothing “do’s and don’ts” that you’ve been taught since you were little. But let’s try thinking of modesty in a different way.

I love the moving on to think of modesty in a different way, but I also think it’s absurd to not admit where the teachings “since you were little” came from, namely Church leaders and manuals and magazines and rhetoric in general.

So maybe this is how the Church can change: by pretending that its previous teachings that are now being discarded didn’t happen, or somehow came from some other source.

Read More

In Modesty, Statistics

Modesty rhetoric in Church magazines has declined since the mid-2010s

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

Over a decade ago (have I really been blogging that long?), I wrote a couple of posts (2011, 2014) where I counted up articles in Church magazines that talked about modesty in dress. Briefly, I found that modesty rhetoric had really ramped up since the turn of the millennium, and not surprisingly, was aimed more at women and girls than at men and boys.

In this post, I’m updating my 2014 post to include ten more years of data. I used the same scoring method that I did in 2014. (The gist is that I used Google to search for articles from magazines on the Church website that used forms of the word modest, and then scored each article for roughly what fraction was about modesty in dress, and also whether it was targeted at women/girls, men/boys, or both.) This graph shows what I found.

The bottom line, like I said in the title, is that there’s been a dramatic decrease since about the time I wrote my last post. This has been particularly noticeable for teen girls, who as far as I can tell haven’t been talked to about modesty since before the pandemic. This trend seems consistent with the Church’s introduction in 2022 of a new For the Strength of Youth pamphlet that is generally less prescriptive and more principles-based. And I noticed in reading the articles that do talk about modesty that they seem much more matter-of-fact and less frantic than previous ones. For example, here’s a good one from the New Era in 2019.

Adult women, on the other hand, have seen a modest 😉 increase in rhetoric aimed at them in the past few years. This also seems consistent with increased focus from the Church on the importance of wearing temple garments, with for example J. Anette Dennis and Dallin H. Oaks talking about it in Conference last year. Of course this focus is mostly on women, as women’s garments are less compatible with commonly available women’s clothes than men’s are with men’s clothes, and in a patriarchal church like ours, women’s dress will always be seen as more of an issue than men’s.

So, two cheers for the results, for teen girls and children in general anyway. It’s definitely a positive step when we can back off body shaming young people who are often the most psychologically vulnerable among us. And for the adult women, I can hope that the new sleeveless-leaning ones will maybe reduce the friction between garments and typical clothing styles a little, and perhaps encourage GAs to worry about something more substantial in their Conference talks.

In Books

Why do Mormons love Jane Austen?

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

Wait, do Mormons love Jane Austen? I grew up in Utah Valley, surrounded by lots of other Mormons, so it was sometimes hard for me to tell what cultural things were particular to Mormons versus common among Americans (or even larger groups). That being said, I did always feel like there was a particular love of all things Jane Austen among people around me. I didn’t participate much in it. I didn’t read any of her books, although I did watch some movie adaptations, with my favorite being the excellent 1995 Sense and Sensibility that Emma Thompson both wrote and starred in.

But getting back to the question, I was honestly a bit surprised when I looked Jane Austen up on Google Trends and found that not only did Utah rank high, it ranked number one! And Idaho was number two. So that seems like pretty good evidence that I was right that Mormons (at least American Mormons) might have a thing for Jane Austen.

 

Read More

In Fun

Hi hungry, I’m Dad: Dad jokes for Father’s Day

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments
Photo by Jennifer Kalenberg on Unsplash

To celebrate Father’s Day, here are a few of my Mormon-themed (or at least church-related) dad jokes. Please recall as you read that when your eyes roll, they are momentarily pointed toward heaven. You’re welcome. (Note: In case you’re curious, I’m the author of all of these jokes, at least as far as I know. But given how joke-telling is a social activity, and they get written and re-written as they’re passed around, it’s entirely possible that I’ve unconsciously borrowed from other sources.)

Q: If Isaiah lived today, what would he call his TV show where he lamented people’s obsession with clothes?
A: Everybody Loves Raiment.

Read More

In Fun

Mormon Product Ideas

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

As someone who’s still blogging in 2025, I realize that I’m several generations behind in how things are done online nowadays. I was thinking of moving on to become a Mormon influencer on TikChat or InstaSnap or somesuch, and was wondering about the contraptions I might get to test or endorse. Here are some of my ideas.

Image credit: Pascal Lapalme on Openclipart

  • Lust monitor. These are a pair of smart glasses which constantly check what you’re is looking at, with special focus on other’s body parts. If you look at any part of another person’s body below the neck for more than one second (time may be adjustable), the glasses will deliver a small shock to your eyeballs. It’s not quite plucking out the offending eye, but it’s a reminder of the possibility. Note: Not recommended for medical professionals or massage therapists.
  • Hidden inflatable seat cushion. For all those times you’re stuck sitting on a hard chair in second hour, or sacrament meeting, or any meeting really! Your fellow members might give you the side eye if you openly pull out a cushioned stadium seat. The pioneers walked across the plains, and you can’t even manage to sit on a hard chair for an hour? But with this subtle inflatable cushion that slips easily into your skirt or pants, you can quietly fill it and have more cushion for the tush-in’. Bonus points if it doesn’t sound like you’re passing gas when you let the air out.

Read More

In Gender Issues, General Conference

Why do women give better conference talks than men?

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

Tamara W. Runia, who’s serving as First Counselor in the YW General Presidency, gave by far my favorite talk of April’s General Conference. I also enjoyed her previous talk in 2023. She’s dueling with Patrick Kearon in my head for my current favorite speaker. And in the previous General RS Presidency, I loved Conference talks from both counselors, Sharon Eubank and Reyna I. Aburto. It occurred to me that there are more women giving strikingly good Conference talks (at least in my view) than there are men, perhaps not in absolute numbers, but certainly as a percentage of the total numbers of women and men giving talks.

Why might this be so? I’ve come up with a couple of lists of reasons. The first is a list of hows, that outline the characteristics of their talks where I feel like they outdo men. The second is a list of whys. These are my guesses about what the causes might be behind the hows that make their talks different.

How

  • Women speakers are less often doctrinaire than men are, less prone to try to lay down the law of This Is The Way Things Are. They seem more often to frame the advice they give as advice, rather than as commandment.
  • Women seem more often concerned with interpersonal connection, and less concerned with hierarchy, even Church hierarchy. Some men seem deeply concerned with members’ submission to Church hierarchy, and to them in particular. They are the Oracles of the Most High God, and they are darn well going to remind us of it. I find this extremely grating.
  • It’s my impression that women are more likely to address people who are out of the Church’s main target demographic, which seems to be young couples who are raising young children. They’re more open to acknowledging that people might be unmarried or widowed or even gay, or that they might be lonely or depressed.
  • Women are less prone to repeating their stories or even virtually entire talks, as some men do.

Read More

In Church Policy, LGBT Issues, Patriarchy

Why does the Church copy the world’s hierarchies?

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

There’s a certain flavor of criticism of the Church that I’ve seen before that I think of as criticism from first principles. It doesn’t criticize the Church in comparison with other churches, or with secular organizations or secular norms, or with its own history or scriptures or rules, but rather just with a feel of what a church that’s actually listening to God should be doing. I feel like the revelations in the past few years of just how much wealth the Church has amassed, for example, have drawn a lot of critiques like this. It just doesn’t seem right for a church, of all organizations, to have so much money.

You can probably explain both the criticisms of this type and the apologetic responses as well as I can. The apologetic responses are straightforward. Our ways aren’t God’s ways. Like Job, where were we when God laid the foundations of the earth? Our role is to go and do as we’re told like Nephi, not murmur about every little thing like his brothers.

Photo by Ann H on Pexels.

In any case, that’s the type of criticism I’m raising today. My question is why the Church, which rhetorically makes such a big deal about being un-worldly, do such a great job of copying the world’s hierarchies. I was thinking through the most obvious hierarchies we can see out there in the world in general, where one group of people has more power than another, and it seems like the Church, in spite of its rhetoric, manages to borrow them all.

  • Men over women: Patriarchy is one of the most prominent features of the Church. Sure, with time, the rhetoric around it has softened into a more chicken form, and since Ordain Women, GAs have told women that they really kinda sorta had the priesthood all along. But the fact is that the Church is still run by men and men only, both at a general and a local level. Women are advisors at best, and they’re frequently straight up ignored.

Read More

In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2025

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

Fastest hymn: Sing Praise to Him (Saturday afternoon)
Slowest hymn: Were You There? (Saturday evening)
Best hymn: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty (Sunday morning)
Worst hymn: God Is Love (Saturday morning)
Most entertaining choir member: See the amazing mustache on a BYU student choir member during the hymn Rejoice, the Lord Is King. I’ve linked a moment in the video when he’s most visible, but I’m clearly not the only one struck by him, as a shot centered on him is currently being used as the thumbnail for the video on YouTube, when most often the thumbnail is a shot of the whole choir.

Longest prayer: 127 seconds, Jorge F. Zeballos, Saturday morning benediction.
Shortest prayer: 44 seconds, Kevin S. Hamilton, Saturday morning invocation. This was the shortest prayer since Claudio R. M. Costa gave a 43-second prayer in April, 2019.

Best image: I like Robert Zund’s Road to Emmaus painting that Henry B. Eyring used in his talk.

Best laughs:

  • Jeffrey R. Holland told a story of one of his grandchildren biting another, after which their father told the victim of the bit that the biter probably didn’t even know what it felt like to be bitten. Naturally, the victim took this as an invitation to bite back.
  • Patrick Kearon talked about gifts, and informed his listeners that even some animals give gifts. He cited two examples: penguins and bonobos. I feel like he might be trolling us (and perhaps some of his fellow Q15 members) here, as penguins are in the news now for being targets of some of Trump’s misguided tariffs, and bonobos are best known for their healthy sexual appetite, especially for homosexual sex.

Read More

In Prayer

What’s wrong with written prayers?

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Mormons don’t do rote prayers. I feel like this was a central teaching in my upbringing. We weren’t like the other Christians who foolishly just said the Lord’s Prayer or recited the 23rd Psalm over and over. We said each prayer new from the heart, at least in theory. Related to this, does anyone else recall how stressful it was to give the closing prayer after a lesson on prayer, because you had to try extra hard to make your prayer original?

Photo by nega on Unsplash

The scriptural support for this position isn’t hard to find. Our go-to is of course Jesus condemning praying with vain repetitions like the heathens in Matthew 6. But we also have the bad example of the Zoramites in Alma 31, who not only dissented from the true church and gave a self-aggrandizing prayer on their Rameumptom, but all gave the same self-aggrandizing prayer. (Not surprisingly, only the Zoramite men got to do this, as the women probably weren’t chosen by God in quite the same way.)

Of course there are exceptions to the rule. We have prayers for ordinances that are required to follow a script. The sacrament, baptismal, and temple ordinances are all like this. And it could be just me, but I feel like the emphasis on this principle has declined in my lifetime. (Or it could be that the emphasis was, to begin with, particular to my ward, or even my family.) Also, perhaps coincidentally, I’m happy to see bishops in wards I’ve lived in appear to become much more forgiving when a priest stumbles over a word in a sacrament prayer. When I was a priest, decades ago, I feel like nobody got away with even the tiniest error without having to re-say the prayer.

Read More

In Fun

Russell M. Nelson’s Calendar Unleashed!

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.

A few days ago, Russell M. Nelson announced the long-awaited dates for the Salt Lake Temple open house: April to October . . . of 2027. As he appears to be opening up his calendar to officially put his stamp on upcoming events, I thought I’d speculate about some of his other calendar entries that he might loose upon the world:

X/X/202X — On the death of Russell M. Nelson, the remainder of the Q15 vote that to keep in remembrance the name of this most beloved of prophets, future presidents of the Church will be called the second Nelson, the third Nelson, and so forth, following the pattern put forth in Jacob 1:11. The Church membership’s vote is, of course, unanimous in favor.

Read More