Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday afternoon session

Saturday afternoon, which means we get sustainings of officers and stuff—so feel free to nap a few extra minutes.

Anyway, as with all of these, the addresses are presented bottom-up, with the last speaker, then the previous speaker, and so on. If you want this session in chronological order, you need to scroll to the end of the post and work upwards. However, mainly ’cause i can’t keep track of it if i do otherwise, the notes for each speaker run top-down.

Confusing? Yep—but it’s where the whole blog-and-Facebook reverse-timestream posting order has led us.

So now scroll down to begin—unless you want to move backwards through time, of course.

Quentin L. Cook (of the quorum of apostles)

• (Note: Our internet kept glitching badly during this address, so i don’t know that i got everything i’d’ve wanted to record here from it.)
• Vicarious ordinances allow eternal families to happen.
• Note that the scriptures talk about vicarious baptisms for “your dead” (emphasis apparent from his spoken delivery).
• (Listening to this, i can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have been around when baptism for the dead was a completely new thing.)

W. Craig Zwick (of the seventy)

• (Memo to the kids watching this address: Don’t ever jump out of a moving vehicle, even if it’s to try to save your kid.)
• Anger and angry words are sinful.
• We need to be civil, even when we disagree.
• It is impossible to know everyone’s contexts and thoughts—so we need to have empathy for all, even (especially?) those we disagree with.
• It might not matter who’s right, but whether we understand and care for each other.
• We need to learn to ask “What were you thinking?” (Though presumably not in an exasperated way, as it’s often heard, i’m thinking.)
• (Yeah, we’ve got an early contender for my favorite address of this conference.)

Claudio D. Zivic (of the seventy)

• If you make a mistake about what the right way is and let yourself be led astray, you will not reach your goal.
• We need to correctly comprehend and interpret the commandments of God.

Robert D. Hales (of the quorum of apostles)

• Don’t claim to love and obey God and then be selectively obedient.
• Because Jesus obeyed, we have the opportunity to return to God.

Richard G. Scott (of the quorum of apostles)

• We should share our conviction that the ordinances of the gospel will help others, and do so in love.
• He told the story of how his (future) wife saying she wanted to marry a returned full-time missionary led to him deciding to serve. However, he also mentioned they both served missions, and i think that’s an important bit of the story, and wish it had been foregrounded more—she wasn't just trying to get him to go, she was modeling something that was part of her own life, too.
• The mention of his parents as temple workers was a nice little rhetorical circle back to the beginning of the address.

Russell M. Nelson (of the quorum of apostles)

• All truth is part of the gospel, and so we should be willing to let our faith show rather than compartmentalizing our spiritual lives from, e.g., our professional lives.
• Wrong is never right, even if everyone does it.

Brooke P. Hales (secretary to the first presidency), statistical report

• We’re closing back in on the number of annual convert baptisms back in the 80s (which was directly followed by a desperate focus on reactivation, but whatevs).

Kevin Jergensen (managing director of the church auditing department), auditing report

• Really, can someone explain to me why we take up valuable general conference minutes with this?

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency), presentation of church officers and authorities

• A couple of mission presidents being called as church officers while they’re still serving (with the calls to take effect at the close of their terms as mission presidents)—been a while since they’ve done that.
• (Editorial comment: I sorta wonder if they’ve had President Uchtdorf present the church officers and authorities the last couple times so that he his name gets pronounced right.)