Hello everyone, my name is John DeLin.

It is September 16th, 2015, and I'm very excited to welcome you to what I'm sort of naming

as the launch of the Mormon Transitions Project.

I'll start with a little bit of background.

Many of you know that I went through an LDS faith crisis around 2011, 2001, 2002 timeframe

when I was serving as an LDS Seminary Teacher in Seattle, Washington, working for Microsoft.

During that time, I learned about many incredible progressive Mormon pioneers.

For those of you who are watching this presentation on YouTube, you'll see this big list

of the types of people that influence me and organizations from BH Roberts to dialogue to

Sunstone to all sorts of websites like post-mormonxmormon.org, New Order Mormon.

There have been so many resources that have been available, scholars and historians,

to help progressive Mormons struggle with and deal with things like a faith crisis, progressive

issues in the church, etc. But by 2005 after I had left Microsoft, I just sort of looked around and

noticed that even though the internet was emerging, you know, New Mormon history and progressive

Mormon thought had not yet penetrated broad Mormon consciousness. And I felt like this is a

problem because I found out that too many people were kind of suffering in silence, you know,

gays, feminist intellectuals, people of color, people who really revered science but felt

conflicted between their faith and knowledge. So many people were struggling. So around 2005,

about 10 years ago, I launched Mormon Stories Podcast, which was this effort to sort of open

up the discourse to invite people to be interviewed and to discuss difficult issues that we weren't

able to talk about in church. And if you think about all the many faces, those of you again who

are watching through YouTube will see all these faces, people that maybe were introduced to for

...