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 thought we’d bring you a really special story that we think we can all learn from, especially during this Easter season as we ponder concepts like redemption and new life. Our guest was Dave Durocher, the Executive Director of The Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City. If you’re an especially up-to-date listener, or you went to Restore last year, you’ve heard a little bit about The Other Side’s story from Joseph Grenny, Dave’s partner and the Academy’s Chairman.
This week we’re bringing you a conversation with Rachel Rueckert, a really amazing young writer who recently published a memoir called East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage. Rachel’s story is a fascinating one. Perhaps due to a highly tumultuous home life as a child, she inherited her suspicions about marriage early. Growing up in the Church, there was a constant drumbeat about marriage and eternal families, but those lessons always seemed to raise more questions for her than they did answers.
When BYU professor Eric Huntsman was growing up, he spent time among Catholics in Pittsburgh and Baptists in Alabama and came to love the different ways other Christian denominations worshiped Jesus. And one of his favorite ways that other Christians worshiped was during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday. Over the years, Eric began incorporating many Holy Week traditions into his spiritual practice and found it helped him connect more deeply with the Savior and his atoning sacrifice.
This week we’re sharing with you one of the most popular presentations from our Restore gathering that happened last October — a talk by Joseph Grenny called “The Other Side.”As a young father, Joseph was determined to have the perfect family. All of kids would be active, go on missions, go to BYU and be stalwart. But that dream was shattered when two of his sons got involved in drugs and crime. Eventually, one son overdosed and almost lost his life.
For this week’s episode, we’re bringing you a story that we really think will uplift and inspire you. Our guest was Liz Shropshire, the founder of Peace Through Music.In our interview with her, Liz tells the story of how she got started teaching music to children in Kosovo who had been affected by the war and ethnic cleansing that took place there in the 1990s. She knew just two things: she could teach music, and she wanted to help: so she got on a plane and made her way to a refugee camp where she began teaching her first group of kids.
Several years ago, Matthew Holland, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s son, was on a sabbatical at Oxford University. One day, he passed by a door that said “Chaplain.” Intrigued, he decided to knock. Thus began a remarkable relationship with Andrew Teal, an Anglican priest and lecturer in theology at Pembroke College, Oxford. Since then, Andrew has developed a close friendship with Elder Holland, attended General Conference, given a BYU devotional address and is currently partnering with BYU to establish a center for faith and reconciliation at Oxford.
It’s been exactly a year since the world received the shocking news that Russian troops had invaded Ukraine, and exactly a year since the lives of millions of Ukrainian people changed forever.
Today, you’re going to hear a really special episode. It’s a conversation with Melissa Inouye and Kate Holbrook that took place last summer, not long before Kate’s passing in August 2022. We spoke with Kate and Melissa about an amazing new book that they co-edited called Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart.
This week, we’re sharing another one of our favorite presentations from our Restore conference, given by Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and called Developing Sexual Wholeness.In her talk, Jennifer brilliantly laid out human sexuality in terms of development, in the same way we might talk about adult development or spiritual development.
This week's guest is Richard Bushman, who is simply one of the most important scholarly voices ever in the Latter-day Saint tradition. Of course, Richard has been interviewed many times over the years, and we wanted to make sure that we covered new ground while asking for his perspective on some of the questions that have propelled and perplexed us throughout our faith journey.
