480: Jeremy Runnells and his Letter to a CES Director Part 1

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2014

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In February 2012, Jeremy Runnels experienced a crisis of faith, which subsequently led to a faith transition in the summer of 2012. In the spring of 2013, Jeremy was approached and asked by a Church Education System (CES) Director to share his concerns and questions about the LDS Church’s origins, history, and current practices. In response, Jeremy wrote what later became publicly known as Letter to a CES Director. Letter to a CES Director very quickly went viral on the internet. The CES Director responded that he read the "very well written" letter and that he would provide Jeremy with a response. No response ever came.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm your host John DeLin.
0:25.6	As always I'm super excited to have a special guest with me today. Today we're
0:32.8	recording this in Salt Lake City kind of downtown. We have seven people who are
0:38.0	here watching you can't see them but I'm happy to have a bit of an audience here.
0:42.8	And we're here to interview Jeremy Reynolds. Jeremy we're going to get into
0:48.9	his story but some of you may have heard of the letter to a CES director.
0:54.1	CES letter.com I think is the website. The short story just to hook you into
0:59.8	the interview is that Jeremy was struggling with his testimony, lived a very
1:05.1	traditional devout LDS life until the point where he started having
1:08.3	questions and eventually his grandfather found out about this and offered for
1:15.2	Jeremy to write a letter to a CES director friend of his grandfather. He
1:20.8	wrote the letter. The letter was received but was never responded to but but it
1:27.2	was such a good letter. I guess he got good feedback from it that he has kind of
1:31.4	expounded upon it and published it to a webpage and it definitely has been a
1:36.4	phenomenon sweeping intellectual Mormonism and it's impacted a lot of people.
1:43.2	So we're going to talk about it today. This is part of a multi-part series so
1:48.0	after we're done with this interview I've invited Brad Kramer who I've
1:53.0	interviewed a few sessions ago who's a faithful sort of scholar. He's going to
1:58.7	sort of defend the believing positions and I've invited Janiel Sussierite who
2:03.8	is a professor at Northwestern University and he's a non-believer and
2:09.1	they're good friends and they're going to have kind of a very
2:11.6	gentlemanly discussion about letter to CES director pros and cons and
	...

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