This is Mormon Stories. I'm John DeLin. I'd like to welcome you all to a special edition of Mormon Stories

podcast. I'm hoping to keep it very brief. But many of you have inquired a bit about where I've

been the past couple years, why I took Mormon stories down, why I've brought it back. And so I wanted

to just take a few minutes to talk to you a little bit about the past, a little bit about the present,

and a little bit about the future of Mormon stories, but most importantly, how I see something

very beautiful that we can all do together. A little bit about the past. When I started Mormon

Stories podcast, I'll be honest, I had an agenda. And my agenda was to figure out a way to help

Mormons stay in the church, LDS church members stay in the church after confronting sort of an

intellectual faith crisis. And so I, you know, tackled issues like polygamy and masonry and Joseph

Smith, all with the intent of saying these intellectual issues do not have to lead you outside of the

church. And, you know, funny enough, I did discover that for a lot of people, there were ways to

work through these issues and maintain their faith. However, it was always disheartening even if it

was a minority of the listeners and I have no way to really quantify it. It became quite difficult

and sometimes disheartening for me when I would hear that something that I put up had the opposite

effect of what I intended. In other words, simply by being exposed to some of the tougher issues,

some of my listeners ended up deciding both through listening to my podcast and through other,

you know, resources that they pursued to leave the church. And to be honest, that kind of freaked me

out. It kind of scared me. And it made me shut down Mormon stories back probably a year in to the

project. Simultaneous to that, I was going through my own faith journey where I was trying to reconcile

all these issues. And to be honest, towards the second half of Mormon stories, I went through a

phase where I was losing my own faith in the church. That's kind of the episode when I interviewed

the Tuscanos and interviewed Grant Palmer and a bunch of the people who were associated with the

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