
You should really take a couple of minutes to read Elder Dale G. Renlund’s account of what he — a physician, by the way — explicitly identifies as the miracle of President Jeffrey R. Holland’s recovery from a very serious illness that brought him to the brink of death: “Of President Holland’s health and recovery, Elder Renlund writes, ‘God is in the details’: ‘It was a miracle’: Elder Renlund writes on social media of visiting President Holland in the hospital and witnessing his critical condition and then miraculous recovery”

I’ve just noticed some sardonic remarks elsewhere about the miracle of Elder Patrick Kearon’s call to the Twelve despite his failure to use a middle initial. Apparently, the use of middle initials is a unique and weird characteristic of Latter-day Saint leaders — to choose just a few examples, in the cases of Heber J. Grant, David O. McKay, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson, Russell M. Nelson, Dallin H. Oaks, and Henry B. Eyring — and, as such, is deserving of scorn.
I mean, the list of prominent Church leaders using middle initials is almost infinite. Think, for example, of such Latter-day Saint luminaries as General Ulysses S. Grant, General Robert E. Lee, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Warren G. Harding, Herbert W. Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, General George A. Patton, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Edward M. Kennedy, William F. Buckley Jr., Gerald R. Ford, George H. W. Bush (two for the price of one!), George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump, John G. Roberts Jr., Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Think, too, of the current all-LDS Joint Chiefs of Staff: General Charles Q. Brown Jr., Admiral Christopher W. Grady, General Randy A. George, General Eric M. Smith, Admiral Lisa M. Franchetti, General David W. Allvin, and General Daniel R. Hokanson. The only outlier is General B. Chance Saltzman, who probably just confused his middle initial with his first name.
Curiously, by contrast — and despite the fact that Latter-day Saint leaders are commonly regarded in some critical circles as simply aping the culture of corporate America — not a single one of the CEOs of Fortune’s Top Ten uses a middle initial.

Religious freedom news from Scandinavia, of all places:
“Denmark’s parliament adopts a law making it illegal to burn the Quran or other religious texts”

(LDS.org) My paternal grandfather was Danish, though never a Latter-day Saint..

For more information on the “Not by Bread Alone: Stories of the Saints in Africa” series, go to https://notbybreadalonefilm.com/en/
For more information in French, go to https://notbybreadalonefilm.com/fr/
To see all of our posts about The Church in Africa, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/africa/

Here are a couple of items from the “Brigham Young University” section of the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:
“National math associations agree: BYU’s got some of the best math programs in the country”
But, of course, there is still other material in the Hitchens File that is crying out for your impassioned condemnation. I offer just a pair of examples here: