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The Conchley Light, a myth in circling glue, lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John DeLin and I am super excited to have back with us today a return guest on Mormon Stories Podcast.

Dr. Dave Christian appeared on Mormon Stories Podcast in kind of early 2011 when he spoke at the very first Mormon Stories conference that was ever held in New York City where he discussed as a topic in that conference,

sort of the difference between utility and validity and it's a concept that has reached a lot of people and has been really super useful.

But that's just scratching the surface of Dave's awesomeness.

Dave Christian has a PhD in psychology from Utah State University.

He's been my friend for at least six years if not more with my walking buddy.

But Dave is honestly just embarrassing by saying he's one of the brightest minds I know and he's super interesting for many reasons not only has he been a therapist to

Mormons and post Mormons for multiple decades but also Dave has this amazing story of how he grew up in St. George and went to serve a mission in Australia.

And while he was on that mission in Australia, his mission president received some very interesting revelations about polygamy and the sister missionaries that

sort of jump started in him a faith crisis that led him leaving the church in his youth and his sort of college years.

And so he has served sort of, he has lived sort of multiple decades as a post Mormon but who also was a therapist to Mormons.

And he's just really bright and really interesting and faithful to about Mormons use him as a therapist all the time.

So he's really good at at following the guidelines of psychotherapy which is to be, you know, to support the values of the clients and not to impose your values on them.

Very respectful but also something super interesting is that even though he probably might lean a bit more towards the atheistic side in his life recently he was just voted as sort of president of the Cash Valley Unitarian University of Solistic Church.

Because he is interested in sort of communities after after Mormonism or even sort of church like communities after Mormonism for post Mormons and people of other persuasions.

And so we're going to do this in two parts. We're first going to talk about his story which is fascinating and then we're going to have Dave share with us a presentation that he recently delivered at the Cash Valley Unitarian University of Solistic Church where he talks about the work of Jonathan Height who produced a book called The Righteous Mind.

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