5 more things I learned about the church at general conference

On Sunday evening, Deseret.com published my column of 12 items I learned about the church during the weekend’s general conference.

A few more arose after I finished writing that and as I reviewed all the talks, so I’ll share them here:

1. Until 1891, the president of the church signed every temple recommend, according to Elder Ronald A. Rasband.

2. When President Russell M. Nelson announced six new temples, a lot of people said they’d never heard of Tarawa, Kiribati. Here are four notes about the nation that consists of 32 atolls and one raised coral island:

— The church was introduced to Kiribati in 1972.

— Today, the nearly 21,000 church members make up 18% of the nation’s population of 115,000.

— Perhaps more people have heard of the Gilbert Islands, of which Kiribati’s islands are a part.

— U.S. Marines captured Tarawa from entrenched Japanese soldiers in a fierce and famous World War II battle. Photographer Frank Filan won a Pulitzer Prize for a photo after the battle.

3. President Nelson also announced a temple in Lindon, Utah, which says something about the amount of temple work being done in Utah County and throughout Utah. The announcement means Utah County will have seven temples — Payson, Provo, Provo City Center, Orem, Lindon, Mount Timpanogos and Saratoga Springs — while its neighbor to the north has four — Draper, Oquirrh Mountain, Jordan River and Salt Lake. In all, Utah will have 25 temples.

4. I didn’t know the last time a father and son had spoken in the same general conference, so my original list of items I learned at during conference listed fathers and sons who have spoken in the same general conference. It also included a father-daughter combination and some brothers who spoke in the same conference. The list wasn’t comprehensive, going back only 20 years, but our readers and my Twitter and Facebook followers persistently mentioned that, just outside that time window, Sister Virginia Hinckley Pearce and her father, President Gordon B. Hinckley, spoke in the same conference seven times. 

5. President Nelson now has announced 49 temples on six continents in six general conferences since he became the prophet.

Read my original column of 12 other items I learned.

LDS Living has 17 inspiring and funny Twitter reactions from general conference.

The decision to end the church’s long association with Boy Scouts has created a domino effect on a lot of former Scout camp property. In this story, the church is working to obtain a camp in Idaho. 

In her conference talk on Saturday, Sister Michelle D. Craig referred to the forum lecture David Brooks gave at BYU, which I covered. Brooks wrote a piece that our own Boyd Matheson included in his newsletter this week under the header, “So Good I Wish We’d Done It.” Here’s the new article by Brooks.

In addition to Elder and Sister Gong (see story link above), the world’s greatest Latter-day Saint golfer tested positive for COVID-19.

This story uses Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on the simple shapes most popular stories follow to describe playoff baseball. If you like novels, writing or baseball, you may well like this piece by Sam Miller, who is one of my favorites. It gets pretty nerdy about baseball in the middle, but you can still pull out the Vonnegut and Hemingway references to story forms.