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Hello and welcome to a very exciting presentation today. My name is John DeLin and I am here with Dr. Dave Christian.

Dave is a, we just got done for Mormon Stories Podcasts doing a one hour interview with Dave.

He's a local psychologist here in Cash Valley. You can find him at mydocdave.com. He's been a good friend of mine for six years. He's my weekly walking buddy.

He is also a really well respected psychologist who's been providing mental health services to Mormons and former Mormons here in Cash Valley for decades.

He also, as you learned in the last episode, was raised LDS, then served a mission in Australia where he had the unfortunate experience of having his mission president attempt to become a polygamist with the sister missionaries in his mission.

So that led Dave to leave the church and now Dave continued after he left the church getting married, having children and visiting the Unitarian Universalist Church off and on.

And so recently he was elected president of the board of the local UU Church. And while I was visiting there, he gave a presentation based on insights from a book called The Righteous Mind by Dr. Jonathan Heit, who is a prominent, I don't know if he's a social psychologist or what he is, but he's a, he's a great mind.

And the purpose of the presentation was to talk about community formation and building bridges, particularly amongst secular folk. So this podcast is going to be sort of a co-release. I'm releasing it on Mormon stories because it's a continuation of my interview with Dave Christian there.

But also I'm going to release it on the Mormon Transitions new podcast because this, you know, the purpose of Mormon Transitions podcast is to support Mormons as they're transitioning either away from orthodoxy towards more progressive Mormonism or leaving Mormonism as post-mormons either way.

There are all sorts of principles and lessons that need to be learned, but more importantly, communities need to be built. So whether you're in a Facebook community as a progressive Mormon who's sort of supplementing your ward experience with these private communities on Facebook or these local communities.

If you look at Mormon Spectrum now, dot org, there's over 120 face-to-face communities all over the world that people are forming as progressive and post-mormons. And they're just some, they're just some basic rules and guidelines and problems that progressive Mormons and post-mormons are going to be facing as they try and, and replace what their,

or supplement what their ward experience has or hasn't given them. Also, if any of you have listened to Dr., if any of you listened to Elaine Debuton in his TED Talk, Atheism 2.0 or heard of the Sunday Assembly or Oasis in the United States, there's this emerging movement of creating secular communities that actually function very much like churches.

But there isn't even a necessary belief in God, lack of doctrine or dogma. And oftentimes these types of congregations are filled with, with progressives. And, you know, there's some costs and benefits to trying to create community with a bunch of, you know, let's just say social liberal political progressives.

And so Dave Christian has this amazing presentation. It's on YouTube. There's some really great visuals. So if you're only listening to this on audio, if you're able, we recommend that you stop.

Go to, you know, more, more, more of msstories.org or more of ms transitions.org and pull up the YouTube video and watch it because you'll get more out of it if you can see the visuals.

So please check us out visually if you're not. But with all that to do, I now turn the time over to Dr. Dave Christian to talk us through his presentation.

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