Faith Matters offers an expansive view of the Restored Gospel, thoughtful exploration of big and sometimes thorny questions, and a platform that encourages deeper engagement with our faith and our world. We focus on the Latter-day Saint (Mormon) tradition, but believe we have much to learn from other traditions and fully embrace those of other beliefs.
For today’s episode, we were lucky enough to bring back Latter-day Saint philosopher and theologian Adam Miller to talk about his new book, Original Grace. Of the many incredible books we’ve read from Adam, this one, we think, might have the most potential to really change the way we engage God and the world.We’ll let Adam explain the major theses of the book, but we’ll just say that in many ways it entirely upends traditional understandings of concepts like justice, suffering, mercy, punishment, and, of course — grace.
In the past few decades, scholarship on the New Testament has opened up exciting new ways of understanding the context of the early followers of Jesus and has enabled new interpretations of the texts they wrote. One of the leading scholars advancing our knowledge of early Christianity is Laura Nasrallah, a professor at Yale who specializes in New Testament texts and archaeology.
The Faith Matters family lost a dear friend this week. Kate Holbrook passed away after a long battle with cancer. Kate was a graceful light in our lives. Her strength, her courage, her wisdom, her intelligence and her gentle manner will be with us forever. Our thoughts, prayers and determined support go out to our good friend Sam Brown, Kate’s forever companion, and to their three daughters.In Kate’s memory and honor, we’re sharing this conversation that she had with Terryl Givens in 2018.
Today, we’re bringing you a really amazing story that we can’t wait for you to hear. It’s the story of Sam Chiou — a remarkable young man who is nonspeaking and autistic, and who was totally unable to communicate for the first fifteen years of his life. His family was unaware that despite being nonspeaking, he was hearing and understanding everything they were saying — and had so much that he wanted to share.
For decades, our understanding of how the brain works has advanced dramatically. Using new theories, methods and tools, like fMRI technology, scientists are beginning to reveal the mysteries of this truly remarkable and complex organ.One scientist on the cutting edge of this research is Michael Ferguson, a BYU grad who is now researching and teaching at Harvard.
In this episode, we spoke with Allison Dayton from Lift and Love, an organization that focuses on strengthening Latter-day Saint LGBTQ families.We met Allison not long ago and were so impressed by the spirit and love she brings to every interaction. She tells her story in the episode itself, but she’s been deeply involved with the LGBTQ community for many years, first through her older brother Preston, and later through her son.
For today’s episode, we’re really excited to bring on Jared Halverson.Jared shares with us a really important concept he calls “proving contraries,” —something we’ve talked a little bit about on the podcast before using the term “polarities.” He spoke with us about how recognizing these polarities can help us understand our own strengths and weaknesses, how attributes that are positive, taken too far, almost always become problematic, and how wrestling with contraries is essential in a life full of growth and meaning.
For this episode, we spoke with Jeff Strong about the experience of missionaries in today’s mission field, including the unique challenges and opportunities they face. This conversation was based largely on a document Jeff wrote, called “What One Mission President Would Tell His Own Grandchildren About Serving a Mission.” Jeff wrote this document after his experience as the mission president of the Bentonville, Arkansas Mission.
With all the exciting things happening at Faith Matters, we thought it would be a good time to step back, take stock of what we’ve done, and share more about where we’re going. So in this episode, Tim and Aubrey were joined by one of Faith Matters’ founders, Bill Turnbull, as well as Faith Matters’ new Executive Director, Zach Davis, to discuss how our organization began, answer common questions we get from listeners, and share more about our purpose and approach.
Under the Banner of Heaven is a recent 7-part dramatized series aired on Hulu by about the horrific 1984 murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty. Like the book it’s based on, the series paints a very grim portrait of Latter-day Saint faith and culture, and has been both praised and panned by critics. In this episode, McKay Coppins and Patrick Mason join Bill Turnbull to explore why the series has had such widely divergent receptions and discuss the validity of Jon Krakauer’s fundamental thesis: that religion and violence go hand in hand.
