A funny thing happened on the way to conformity.

A group of us have been reading old general conferences and posting on them every week (if you want in, let me know). We are all Americans, mostly around the same age. We are all Mormons. We are all orthodox Mormons. We are all pretty much bumptious blogging orthodox Mormons, the kind that are ideological about being Mormon.   And we were all using the same form—the post—which has a pretty narrow range of expectations about tone and format.

So by rights the results of our posts should be stultifying conformity. But they aren’t. My most recent post somehow ended up treating the Sunday morning session of General Conference as a mix of breezy uplift—“here’s some good advice, buddy”—and a bit of cozy catching up with endearing old friends.

Sometimes co-blogger Nathaniel Givens saw the session as a series of sermons tied together by love.

Another blogger saw it as an occasion for a cry of the heart about the neglected inactives.

John Hancock turned out a pithy sermonette.

Michelle Linford received a confirmation of some of her spiritual ponderings about the Scouting program.

Ralph Hancock saw the axe of truth being wielded to cleave through the persisting errors of feminism and other modern ills.

What I saw as a bit of cute antiquity in a talk about meetinghouse libraries, another blogger saw as the beginning of an unfolding of blessings that are now represented in the m any online materials available at lds.org.

Diversity is irrepressible. Stultifying conformity only happens when diversity becomes the goal.