Although he was born in Salt Lake City, where he received both his bachelor’s and medical degrees (before doing further work in cardiology at Johns Hopkins), Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Council of the Twelve is, in important ways, Swedish. (His full name, by the way, is Dale Gunnar Renlund.)
His parents were immigrants to the United States from Sweden and Finland, and Swedish was his first language. Moreover, he spent three of his teenage years living in Sweden while his father was a building missionary here. And then he served as a missionary himself in Sweden.
Formative experiences, those.
It’s impossible to know what particular impact, if any, they might have on his apostolic ministry. But you may already have noticed that he recently cited a Swedish Christmas carol in a general conference talk:
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2016/04/that-i-might-draw-all-men-unto-me?lang=eng
The Austrian-American sociologist of religion Peter Berger once quipped that, if India is the most religious nation on earth and Sweden the least religious, America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. I’m not sure exactly how that might apply — or, more likely, not apply — to Elder Renlund. But I’m interested.
Posted from Stockholm, Sweden
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