Tom,
I had a business trip and had to set this aside. The fix ended up being very simple. It’s not a bug, technically, but simply an omission of an argument in the /inc/template-tags.php file.
I changed line 604 from:
<p class="site-description"><?php echo html_entity_decode( get_bloginfo( 'description' ) ); ?></p>
to
<p class="site-description"><?php echo html_entity_decode( get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' ) ); ?></p>
and everything started working again. I think it was just an omission of the ‘display’ bit. That was included on all of the other templates I tested, and was also how your site title is configured in line 600.
So all is working again. If this is an inappropriate fix, would you please let me know why? I’m learning (slowly) and would appreciate the explanation and education.
Thanks for all of your help!