Music

Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon stories are fully tax deductible

and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you.

To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today at MormonStories.org.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John DeLin.

And today we have with us a guest that I've wanted to have on Mormon Stories for a long time. This is not his first appearance on Mormon Stories.

John Hamer was part of some of the very early Mormon matters panel discussions that we had several years back. Is that true, John?

Yeah, absolutely. That was a great set of discussions and I also came right after you restarted your podcast, the Mormon Stories Podcast. Joanna came on and then I came on, I think.

That's right. That was around 2009 or 2010. But one thing we've never done and something I've wanted to do with John for a long, long time is to actually have him tell his story because I think his story is fascinating.

John's interesting for a number of reasons is as far as I'm concerned. He's super nice and super smart. He is a, is it cartographers that we call yourself John?

Well, I usually just say map maker. The reason why I say that obviously cartographers, the more scientific word, I don't, I don't do precision cartographic work or like you might do if you were a geologist or something like that.

The kind of maps that I make are historical maps where generally I'm illustrating a historical history book. And so in that case, it's less about precision and more about conveying the ideas of history through maps.

Right. So if you look at, for example, your LDS set of scriptures where they have those maps that show, you know, the journey of the Saints from New York to, you know, Navu, it would be that type of map that has some geography on it, but also has stuff related to people.

And, you know, John is not just, you know, as a master's degree from University of Michigan in this, this type of stuff, but also he's been involved with the Joseph Smith papers project doing maps for them and has been doing maps for Mormon history, various books for many, many years.

It's been one of the, you know, leaders in the John Whitmer Historical Association, which is the Community of Christ sort of parallel to the Mormon history association.

And he's actively involved now in the Community of Christ, which is the new name for the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So many, many reasons why John is interesting to me, but most importantly, he's just a super knowledgeable person about church history. He's, he's very astute in terms of his navigation of, you know, these very complicated Mormon cultural waters.

He's, he's been a long time blogger on the bicomen consent blog as a, as a non-member of the church, but we'll get into all that.

John, is there anything else I, I left out that should be noted before we jump into a really generous introduction. Now I'm really excited to be back on your program and talking about the story.

And, and one really important thing that we're going to be talking about is the fact that John, for the reasons that we'll get into felt like he needed to leave the LDS church.

And, and probably, I don't know if you, we'll talk about whether you call yourself an atheist or an agnostic narrower, whether you don't like those labels, but my guess is you, you went through times of self identifying as atheist or agnostic.

And what, what I think is really interesting is that John has, you know, decided to affiliate with the community of Christ church and has been super active there.

...