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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John DeLin. And I'm super, duper excited as usual for this episode.

For those of you who kind of listened to us weekly last week, we released an interview with Brad Kramer.

Sort of what I'd like to call kind of a new generation of Mormon apologists, sort of who's striving for fully informed, non-defensive and highly empathetic, sort of faith and approach to non-mormonism and disaffected Mormonism.

He also offers a framework for belief that's very pragmatic, that sets a very low bar for expectations of the church.

It also retains some grains of faith and most of all gives a higher call to kind of charity and maturity in the dialogue between believing Mormons and former Mormons or ex-Mormons, etc.

So I really recommend you go back and listen to that episode with Brad Kramer. And in that episode we talked about kind of an overarching strategy where we were going to interview Brad, then we're going to interview our guests today that I'll introduce in a second.

Then we're going to interview Jeremy Reynolds, if that's how you pronounce his last name, about his letter to a CES director that sort of outlines many primary, you know, historically based and scientifically based concerns about the church.

And then we're going to have a dialogue between at least one of our current guests and Brad to try and parse out in sort of an epic fashion, some of the main intellectual issues that are confronting Mormons in the 21st century.

So that's the big plan. Now I'm super eager to introduce my guests. I alluded to this in my last episode, but I'll, I'm going to do another introduction.

So in the first year of Mormon Stories podcast and the actual release date of this first episode is November 17th, 2005, as I calculated, it's the sixth interview I conducted in Mormon Stories and it's actually episodes 10 and 11.

I interviewed a couple.

During the interview, the couple went by their aliases for whatever reasons, just privacy or concerns or respect for others or career concerns or others they can they can describe that if they want to, but basically they went by aliases.

The husband in the marriage went by roasted tomatoes and the wife in the marriage went by serenity valley and in that interview, they talked about how he sort of grew up in Salt Lake and wrestled with a belief in God and with a belief in the church in his kind of high school years.

Eventually received a spiritual manifestation that led him to feel like he should serve a mission. He also acknowledged that it would have been severely disappointing to his family if he didn't go.

He served a mission for the church also also talked about a witness regarding, you know, Christ's love and how central that was and had some bumpy times on his mission, but returned from his mission.

Sort of with this commitment to the church intact and went to graduate school and parallel to this she serenity valley grew up in a home where dad wasn't really an active member at least for a lot of her upbringing and mom had some pretty significant illnesses if I recall.

And that led to her was it was it sort of being not adopted I don't want to say but but kind of is it was adopted.

My brother and I both. Okay and and for her she she was raised in the church but because of gender equality issues because of teachings around fear and you know apocalyptic kind of teachings and other types of experiences she she took a very different path and asked have her name removed from the church move to California.

Met did you meet Jason there in in high school okay met in high school somehow ended up in California ended up marrying Jason not in the temple at first she attended a Piscopalian church if that's that's right and and you know the feeling was that she wouldn't ever return to the church but after a couple years and after tiring from leading a youth program there slightly she.

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