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Hi everybody. Welcome to Latter Day Struggles. This is your host, Valerie. I am so excited to be back here for episode number three of a four-part series. Welcome, Russ Hinkley. How are you today?

I'm great. We are going to be continuing to talk about Russ's book Beyond Belief.

And I'm going to put you on the spot just a tiny bit, Russ, and ask if you would to give us just a little bit of an overview of what this book is about and maybe kind of talk our audience through what we've been talking about thus far in this series.

We went through on the previous episode, sort of the genesis of how this book started. You know, I started to connect dots that some of the

stuff that appears in creeds is actually just non-responsive to what Jesus was teaching.

It's all about Jesus. It's not from Jesus. And so I started to work on that concept. And then I heard an interesting talk where someone had personalized their articles of faith, which is basically our creed. And I thought that was very interesting. Also around the same time, I heard an interesting talk in our ward in Minnesota when we were

there.

This very nice guy, very funny guy that I had worked with on several snow removal projects

in the winter gave this talk. And the content of the talk was really

some very dogmatic sort of positions on gender. And then he got kind of emotional talking about

how he didn't feel safe at work, saying these type of things. And over and over in the talk,

he kept saying about these gender-affirming things, this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Well, this really kind of distilled my desire to write this book about talking about things

that Jesus was actually teaching, how these elements

I think could work together to improve our spiritual life together. And it highlights to me what

I'd like to accomplish with the book of really changing the ratio of what we talk about at church.

Frankly, I would love to spend less time talking about sort of transitory culture and border

...