By Wayne C. Booth Can it be good—even spiritually essential—to be a hypocrite? This professor of rhetoric thinks so. Wayne Booth shares the fruits of his life-long interior discussion between his boyhood Mormon religion fundamentalism and his adult “faith.” All of it, the direct result of his two years as a conflicted, intellectual LDS …
Category: Podcasts
Arnold Lobel and Me
By Martha Taysom Martha Taysom is a retired scholar of American intellectual history and the mother of five children, of whom Matt is the fourth. When Matt was young, we often read Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories together. His head would rest against my arm as he followed these simple but wise …
Low and the Hermeneutics of Silence
By Jacob Bender Jacob Bender recently completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. He has previously published in Dialogue, Sunstone, Peculiar Pages, West Trade Review, and WLN, and has articles forthcoming in American Indian Quarterly and Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. The veteran indie-trio Low, when they are …
Rejecting Dogma By Embracing Paradox
Christ focused his teachings on subverting the letter of the law in order to pursue its spirit. In other words, he pointed us away from the known toward the unknown. Mormonism has evolved into a rigid and dogmatic group dominated by authority. Its members frequently focus on the importance of ideology, often leading them toward …
Learning to Breathe After the Death of a Child
How does the LDS culture respond when the death of a child occurs? What could we do to be more helpful? Three parents will tell their stories of losing a child and the path their grief took. Doe Daughtery Reva Beth Rullell Patrick Bryson
Epistemological Guardianship: The Importance of How We Know What We Know
I know the Church is true is a very loaded statement. With over 13 years of professional experience working with data, Mithryn is very familiar with executives who claim to “know” things that turn out not to be true. This presentation has been given professionally to discuss the concept of “how we know what we …
The Greatest and the Least: The Theology of the Parables and Miracles of Jesus
Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, in which he equates himself to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner—”the least of these”— is not simply an isolated parable with a message encouraging inclusivity; it forms an integral part of the meaning embedded in all of his parables …
How I Became an LGBTQ Ally While Serving as a YSA Bishop and How We Can Better Support our LGBTQ members
Ostler will recount his journey to becoming a LGBTQ ally while serving as a YSA bishop. Between hearing the stories of his LGBTQ ward members and the Church’s recent policy statements, Ostler rebuilt his LGBT beliefs/attitudes/conclusions from scratch. He now sees his LGBT friends as some of his Heavenly Parent’s finest sons and daughters, equal …
The Spiritual Brain
Brain science has matured to the point where it is beginning to subsume the philosophical discipline of religious phenomenology. In this session, Dr. Michael Ferguson will lead attendees through an exciting spiral of divine ascent, complete with detailed mechanisms for the cognitive and neural dynamics of theosis (i.e., divine imitation). The best of contemporary science …
Quantifiably Stranger Than Fiction
In the gerentocracy of the LDS Church, actuarial tables can be (and have been) used to forecast leadership a few decades in the future. Though these predictions are generally quite accurate, surprises happen. Using historic actuarial tables, this presentation demonstrates four time periods where reality deviated most from the statistically most likely path, then presents …