Apostolic asides: 29 brief insights from footnotes Latter-day Saint leaders added to conference talks
Published at | Updated at
SALT LAKE CITY (Deseret News) — Yes, Latter-day Saint leaders chiefly use footnotes to their general conference talks to cite scriptures they used, but they also make personal observations, share data about the church, refer to research or describe details about church policies and practices.
There is a lot to learn in these apostolic asides. Here are 29 brief observations culled from the footnotes of the talks by leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at last weekend’s 190th Semiannual General Conference.
1. Among the publications cited by church leaders in their footnotes for this conference, in addition to the scriptures and church magazines, were The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the Economist, The Atlantic, Christianity Today, the Babylonian Talmud, The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, the Deseret News, CNN.com and the European Journal of Population and Church News.
2. President Russell M. Nelson wrote one of the footnotes that best qualifies as an apostolic aside: “I have spoken of Israel in at least 378 of the more than 800 messages I have delivered during my 36 years as an apostle,” he wrote in the first footnote to his Sunday morning talk, “Let God prevail.”