Henry B. Eyring

In 2014, after a meeting with Pope Francis, Eyring spoke at Humanum, "an International Interreligious Colloquium on The Complementarity of Man and Woman," held in Vatican City. It was the first time that a pope and a top LDS general authority ever met.

Eyring was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the second child of Henry Eyring, then a professor at Princeton and later the dean of the graduate school at the University of Utah and president of the American Chemical Society, and his wife, Mildred Bennion. His father's sister, Camilla Eyring, married Spencer W. Kimball, making Henry B. the nephew of Kimball, who was the 12th president of the LDS Church.

They are the parents of six children (four sons and two daughters). Their sons include Henry J. Eyring, president of BYU–Idaho; and Matthew J. Eyring, the Chief Strategy Innovation Officer of Vivint, a home automation company in North America. Eyring is a first cousin once-removed of former Michigan Governor George W. Romney; his paternal grandmother was Romney's aunt. Romney's son, Mitt, was the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee and a former Massachusetts governor who is currently serving in Congress as the junior senator from Utah.

As a member of the First Presidency, Eyring has dedicated the San Salvador El Salvador, Gilbert Arizona, Payson Utah, Indianapolis Indiana, and Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temples where he had also presided at the groundbreaking in 2011 as well as rededicating the Buenos Aires Argentina and Mexico City Mexico Temples.

Eyring was sustained as Second Counselor in the church's First Presidency on October 6, 2007, filling the vacancy left by the death of James E. Faust, on August 10, 2007. When the First Presidency was reorganized following the death of Gordon B. Hinckley, Eyring was called and set apart as the First Counselor on February 3, 2008. The new First Presidency, with Monson as president, was announced on February 4, 2008.

Following the death of church president Howard W. Hunter, Eyring was sustained as a member of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on April 1, 1995 and ordained an apostle later that week.

Eyring has served twice as Commissioner of Church Education, from September 1980 to April 1985, and from September 1992 to January 2005, when he was replaced by W. Rolfe Kerr.

Eyring served as president of Ricks College from 1971 to 1977, as a counselor to Presiding Bishop Robert D. Hales from 1985 to 1992, and as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, from 1992 to 1995.

In the fall of 1962, Eyring began work as a professor at Stanford University. He completed his doctorate in business in the summer of 1963. That summer, Eyring did a fellowship with the RAND Corporation. Eyring had married his wife, Kathleen, the summer before he started at Stanford, and they spent their first year of married life moving through various homes his real estate developer father-in-law was in the process of refurbishing. They then spent the next 10 years living in the guest house of his in-laws' property.

Eyring was an associate professor of business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1962 to 1971. He was also a Sloan Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, he took multiple courses in human behavior, including courses from Douglas McGregor, who died of a heart attack while Eyring was at MIT, and also Ed Schein and Warren Bennis.

Eyring and his wife, Kathleen Johnson, met at a YSA meeting held at Rindge, New Hampshire at the Cathedral of the Pines in the spring of 1960. They became further acquainted at a meeting at the LDS Longfellow Park Chapel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the next summer. Johnson was a native of Palo Alto and was a student at Stanford University. She had previously studied summers at the University of Vienna and University of Paris and was studying at Harvard University the summer she met Eyring. Wilbur Cox, the LDS Church's district president (to whom Eyring was serving as a counselor), made accommodations to facilitate Eyring's dating Johnson. After an intense courtship that first summer, Eyring and Johnson continued courting with her making multiple cross-country airplane trips until they were engaged early in 1961. They were married in the LDS Church's Logan Temple in July 1962, with the marriage performed by his uncle, Spencer W. Kimball.

Henry Bennion Eyring (born May 31, 1933) is an American educational administrator, author, and religious leader. Eyring has been the Second Counselor to Russell M. Nelson in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) since January 14, 2018. Previously, Eyring was the First Counselor to Thomas S. Monson in the First Presidency from 2008 until Monson's death on January 2, 2018. Eyring was the Second Counselor to Gordon B. Hinckley in the First Presidency from October 6, 2007, until Hinckley's death on January 27, 2008.