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Sunstone turns 50 this year. For those who don't know, Sunstone is a magazine or it's a journal about

Mormonism, but it's also a community, a kind of gathering place for people who think deeply

and critically about the faith. Tonight, in Salt Lake City, they'll begin their annual symposium

for a mix of scholars and faithful members and ex-members and podcasters and theology

nerds. And the lineup, as usual, will be all over the place. There will be presentations on the

Book of Abraham, panels on queer spirituality, a look at Mormon internet culture.

Scholar Taylor Petrie told us Sunstone emerged from this moment when curiosity and frustration

with the limits of official discourse was bursting at the seams.

This was around the turn of the 20th century when science and scholarship like evolution and

biblical criticism was starting to challenge literalism and orthodox belief.

So he says leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints figured they needed to get out

ahead of it.

What if we sent off a bunch of young men to the University of Chicago Divinity School to actually

learn something about religion,

to learn something about the Bible, Christian history, and bring that knowledge back so that

we can ourselves become an intellectual people, be respectable among our religious peers.

There are a lot of things that are happening that are challenging traditional

religious narratives in these years. Evolution, the scopes, trials, and the kind of

biblical literalism versus scientific truth. Latter-day Saints were contending with those issues

themselves. Interrelated to that are the new sciences of geology and the history

of the earth that are kind of showing that maybe the earth isn't 5,000, 6,000 years old. It's

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