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Uchtdorf’s wingman

Sometimes it takes a little dude to cut a big shot down to size.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was reminded of that this week when he attended a news event with senior apostle Dieter Uchtdorf celebrating next year’s reopening of the Salt Lake Temple.

At one point, the two greeted members of a children’s choir, who sang the hymn “I Love to See the Temple” at the gathering.

“As we were shaking hands, of course, President Uchdorf was the star shaking hands with these kids, and I was coming behind shaking hands,” Cox said. “At the very end, one of them turned to me and said, ‘Are you his bodyguard?’”

That remark drew plenty of chuckles since the governor doesn’t have a particularly, um, imposing physical presence.

“A poor bodyguard indeed,” Cox conceded.

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Around the world

• Apostles Dieter Uchtdorf and Neil Andersen traveled to Spokane, Washington, to mourn with and comfort members who lost homes and possessions in last month’s devastating wildfires.

“Our Heavenly Father has not promised us no pain, no fire, no accident, no illness,” Uchtdorf said in a news release. “But what he is promising is that he is there. He will walk with us through illness, through loss, through pain, through suffering.”

• She grew up in the church. She married in the temple. She served as women’s Relief Society president in her congregation.

Then, in 2005, Elissa Minor walked away from her husband of 25 years, her religion and the “only life she’s ever known to embrace her identity as a queer woman.”

Minor details this personal odyssey in her memoir, “Another Eve: Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast,” set to be released next month.

“I was just massively unhappy in the church,” Minor told Oregon ArtsWatch. “I knew I didn’t agree with so many of the tenets, and then I saw my dad in the neuro ICU. He was in his early 50s. And I thought, ‘When I am my father’s age, how do I want to have spent my time?’”

She went home, the article adds, and told her husband, “I’m done. I’m out.”

Minor later married Katie in a joyous wedding, conceding that her former faith did get this much right: “A wedding is holy.”

• Another accomplished writer, Talene Monahon, is penning a play about four generations of professional Mormon family musicians, the Eye On Sun Valley news website reports.

Monahon, a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her satirical drama “Meet the Cartozians,” is developing the Mormon play as the resident playwright for an arts nonprofit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

• The church gave CNN’s cameras a peek inside parts of the Salt Lake Temple as workers move ever closer to wrapping up renovations in advance of next year’s public tours.

At one point, the network’s Nick Watt is shown with Andy Kirby, the church’s director of historic temple renovations, underneath the iconic six-spired building.

“Nearly 200 million pounds of temple now [rest] on 98 earthquake-proofing base isolators,” Watt explains, which allow the temple to shift up to 5 feet in any direction if a major temblor strikes.

The church has declined to say how much the renovations and seismic retrofit cost. But CNN said outside observers pegged the price tag at more than $2 billion.

• The Asia Area Presidency offered its condolences after deadly flash floods hit Nepal and China.

“The church will assess opportunities,” the leaders wrote, “to provide relief and assistance to those impacted.”

• Apostle Patrick Kearon on Sunday dedicated the Phnom Penh Temple, the faith’s first in Cambodia, home to thousands of Buddhist temples.

“We are in a land that has known extraordinary pain, hardship, loss and despair,” Kearon said in an apparent reference to the nearly 2 million who died in the 1970s “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge in the Southeast Asian country. “It is so fitting that the Lord has seen to provide a house here which will draw our hands and hearts far beyond the trials of mortality and into eternity.”

From The Tribune

• And it came to pass that a Latter-day Saint actor-turned-marketer did put forth a plan to produce Book of Mormon videos generated entirely by artificial intelligence.

• The value of the church’s publicly reported stock portfolio is nearing a record high of nearly $61 billion, but outside analysts question the investment approach.

• Tribune guest columnist Michael O’Brien reminds Latter-day Saints that Utah is the “right place” for Catholics, too.

• Apostle Dieter Uchtdorf announces “Rejoice in Christ” as the theme for next year’s hotly anticipated public tours of the renovated Salt Lake Temple. Here’s how to get tickets.

• Utah’s Ephraim Temple opens to public tours through Sept. 19 in advance of an Oct. 11 dedication by apostle Ronald Rasband.