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 honored to bring back the inimitable Terryl Givens. Terryl and his son Nathaniel have recently released a new book, called Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard — And Still Is. This is a remarkable book and addresses some of life’s most profound questions, especially as they pertain to the modern world.
For today’s episode, we spoke with Kristian Heal. BYU’s Maxwell Institute has just released an amazing new volume of research called Ancient Christians, that offers remarkable insights into Christianity’s earliest centuries. It’s intended for Latter-day Saints, but based on the best scholarship available to give us a glimpse into what these ancient Christians believed, how they worshiped, and the ways in which they saw and experienced the world.
This week, we’re excited to share with you another presentation from our Restore conference, and one that we think was super memorable to everyone who attended. It was given by our friend Jared Halverson, and called “Don’t Let a Good Faith Crisis Go to Waste.”In it, Jared shares his experiences as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and person of faith who’s been through — and helped others work through — faith crises and faith journeys of all types.
This week, we’re bringing back a couple of our favorite guests and close friends, McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding. McArthur and Bethany have just released a new book titled: In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents: A Couples’ Guide to Creating a More Divine Marriage.
This week, we were honored to bring on a guest we’ve hoped to have on for years — Susan Cain. In 2013, she released her book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. But today, we brought Susan on to talk about her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, another masterwork that reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has been praised by Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, and Adam Grant.
As we imagine many of you have, we’ve been thinking a lot about Jesus these last few weeks. From the nativity we set up in our living room to the movies we’re watching to the hymns we’re singing in Church, this is a time that in so many beautiful ways, makes him more prominent in our lives and minds.And one question naturally comes up from there: when we imagine Jesus, what do we see? For many of us, it’s probably heavily influenced by the art we grew up with.
Today we’re sharing with you one of our absolute favorite presentations from our Restore gathering that happened in October — a talk by Patrick Mason that he called “Envisioning the Restoration’s Third Century.”As we prepare for our Church to enter into this next era, it’s become increasingly clear that something fundamental has changed; people inside and outside the Church are seeing the world and their place in it in different ways. Patrick points out that the world itself is rapidly becoming more secular, or, at the very least, less religious.
In Japanese culture there is a beautiful practice called Kintsugi, which translates roughly to “golden repair”. This is how it works: when a piece of ceramic breaks, like a teacup or plate, instead of gluing the broken pieces back together so that the cracks are hidden, a special gold or silver adhesive is used so that the fractures are emphasized and even celebrated.
We couldn’t be more excited about today’s episode, and it’s with someone we’ve wanted to get on the podcast for years — Peter Enns. Pete is a well-known bible scholar and is the Abram S. Clemens professor of Bible Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania. In recent years, Pete has become well known for several highly popular books, including How the Bible Actually Works, The Bible Tells Me So, and the book we discussed with him today: The Sin of Certainty.
Everything seemed to be going right for Jason Portnoy. While studying engineering at Stanford, his career took a sharp and unexpected turn upward when he met the CEO of a new startup — a company that became PayPal. He was soon offered a job, jumped on the rocketship and didn’t look back.