Showing all posts by Ziff

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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In Music

Favorite and Least Favorite Lines in Hymns

Author ZiffPosted on 20 Comments
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

What are your favorite and least favorite lines in hymns? Are there any that make you happy to think of, or that make you cringe when you sing them? Here are a few of mine. I’ll start with my least favorites so I can end on a positive note.

Angels above us are silent notes taking
Of ev’ry action; then do what is right!

– Do What Is Right

I have enough stress with the visible entities in my life without worrying about angels spying on me and taking notes so they can scold me later.

There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question;

– Choose the Right

This is just patently wrong. Of course there are some decisions that have a moral dimension to them, but many decisions have no such dimension. If I’m choosing what color tie to wear to church, or what cereal to eat, there’s no reason for me to worry about whether I’m choosing the right. Furthermore, even when decisions do have a moral dimension, it’s typical for them to be far more complicated than just right and wrong. Rather, there are multiple options with all kinds of characteristics that we need to weigh. As Dallin H. Oaks famously reminded us, there may be good, better, and best.

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In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2024: Funniest Comments

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments (and lines in posts) that I read on the Bloggernacle last year. I’ve typically excerpted just a part of a longer comment or post. Each person’s name is a link back to the original comment or post, though, so you can go and see the larger context if you’re interested.

In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Dave B., in his post “How to Be A Good Ex-Mormon” at W&T:

Think of the Church as a very big room, maybe the Conference Center, with a variety of exits. There’s a door marked “Catholic,” there’s a door marked “Lutheran,” there’s a door marked “my local Evangelical mega-church,” there’s a door marked “None, nada, nothing, it’s just a big empty Universe, no God, no Force.” And then there are the specifically Mormon doors, one marked “Anti, and proud of it” one marked “formally but quietly disaffiliated,” another marked “quietly went inactive,” one marked “PIMO” (you don’t really go through that door, you just look at it wistfully), one marked “they exed me” (that’s the door you get pushed through, whether you want to or not).

Abby Maxwell Hansen, in her post “The Priesthood Makes You Special” at Exponent II:

This got me thinking about the renaming of the girls’ classes from Beehive, Mia Maid and Laurel to “12- & 13-year-old class”, “14- & 15-year-old class”, and “16- & 17-year-old class”. (These new class names roll right off the tongue just like saying “I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” does.)

Hawkgrrrl, in her post “Attention Seekers” at W&T:

Someone [on Twitter] asked what was the craziest rule your mission had, and I shared our mission rule that you couldn’t attend church if you didn’t have investigators . . . . After I made that comment, a bunch of “defenders of the faith” chimed in accusing me of making it up. . . .

Though I was hated and persecuted for saying that we had this mission rule, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? We actually had this mission rule; and who am I that I can lie about it, or why does the world think to make me deny what actually happened? For we had had this mission rule; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it (and probably didn’t like it), and I could not deny it…

Joseph Smith History 1: 25, sorta

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In Children, Church Life, Suffering

Ideas I Accepted Uncritically

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

Janey’s recent post “Should We Make Life Easier or Harder? at W&T got me to thinking about a little story bordering on aphorism that I recall hearing a number of times as a kid and a teen in the 1980s. General Sunday School President Mark L. Pace recently told a version of it:

Photo by Muhammad Syafi Al – adam on Unsplash

President Pace particularly emphasized the importance of every member learning the gospel for themselves. He shared what he’s learned from watching baby chicks hatch during the years he’s spent raising chickens.

Hatching isn’t a simple process, he said. It sometimes takes 12 to 18 hours, with the baby chick resting between bouts of pecking the eggshell. And on a few occasions, out of concern for the bird’s life, he’s peeled away the eggshell for the baby chick.

“All I can tell you is that every time I have endeavored to do it for them, instead of them doing it for themselves, they die,” President Pace said. “They make it out, they may live for several hours. But there is something about the physical process of them coming out of the egg on their own that gives them the strength to stand up and walk and adjust to life outside the egg.”

Similarly, people must spiritually “hatch” for themselves, he said.

Even aside from his explicit analogy to spiritual development, I think the story gives a clear message that we need to worry more about being too soft than too hard. It’s better to err on the side of letting people suffer too much than on the side of coddling them too much. (Along similar lines, I remember a Seventy including the idea “Hard Is Good” in his Conference talk title a few years ago.)

What I find most striking about the story is that I hadn’t thought about it in decades probably before Janey’s post brought it back to mind, but it’s an idea that seemed so utterly logical when it was presented to me at the time that I just accepted it uncritically.

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In Christmas, Fun, Music

The Twelve Days of Temples

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

Photo by Isabella Quirino on Unsplash

On the first day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the second day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . two vaporware ones1
and renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the third day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . three in the Congo
two vaporware ones
etc.

On the fourth day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . four near Mexico City
three in the Congo
etc.

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In Fun, General Conference, Music

Think Celestial: A hymn

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

A bunch of years ago, I wrote a post where I converted a particularly memorable Conference talk into a hymn. I thought this would be a fun exercise to try again, this time with Russell M. Nelson’s “Think Celestial” from October 2023. Sing to the tune of “Choose the Right.”

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Celestial is the way you must be thinking.
Keep in mind the coming afterlife.
Think not you can be merry, eating, drinking.
Be celestial as man and wife.

Chorus
Celestial! Celestial!
Stop thoughts that may be troubling you!
Celestial! Celestial!
Recall you’re one of chosen few!

Fabulous is the plan that God has for us!
If we tithe, attend the temple oft.
Chastity is the rule, it’s ever been thus.
Be safe. Don’t risk your parts cut off!

Chorus

Celestial! It will answer every question!
Celestial! It solves all hurt and pain!
Celestial! It erases all depression!
Heed not those who dare to complain!

Chorus