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Hi, I'm Stephen Carter, the editor of Sunstone Magazine.

Like you, I'm addicted to blogs and podcasts that explore Mormon themes, but I also want to be with people, the kind who is curious about history, theology, and cultures I am.

That's why I've been going to Sunstone Symposiums for more than a decade now. I want to explore new ideas. I want to see Mormonism from other perspectives.

And, I'll admit it, I want to have lunch with my Mormon Studies heroes.

Sunstone has some great symposiums coming up, including one in Berkeley on January 30th, one in Mesa, Arizona on February 20th, and our first ever International Conference in Birmingham, England from February 26th to 28th.

Some of our speakers will include Wendy Montgomery, Dale McGowan, Natasha Helfer Parker, Christian Moore, Lindsay Hansen Park, and John Dillin.

Visit Sunstone.org to learn more about our symposiums in magazine. Come join us. It's good to be together.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dillin. It is January 12th, 2016. And I am super excited for this interview, as always.

Yesterday, we, on January 11th, we interviewed a panel of distinguished guests that included Jane Olson-C Wright, Jamie Hanna's Handy, Marisa Calderwood, and John Hammer.

And we tried to review kind of, you know, main events in Mormonism in 2015. It was a great discussion. I really enjoyed it.

And as we told you yesterday, we were going to pull together a second panel of equally distinguished and insightful guests. Do you guys feel flattered? It's all true.

To talk about other topics, and there will probably be some overlap. But we are going to dig deeper into kind of the events of 2015, where we are in 2016,

and where we are going. And I can't be more excited. Some of the main themes today are going to be about kind of the state of the Mormon Internet, progressive Mormonism, Mormon studies, Mormon apologetics, Mormon feminism.

We talked briefly about those at the end yesterday, but I want to dig into those a little more deeply. We will talk about church government, retrenchment, leadership crisis.

Gina wants to talk about social group formations. It'll be awesome to hear what she has to say there, new apostles. We can't have plig- Lindsay Ann without talking about polygamy.

We're going to try and talk about race and international perspectives in the church and millennials, because Christy says that she represents that, technically represents that population.

So without any further ado, I'm going to introduce our guests. So we will begin. And all of these guests are returned visitors to Mormon stories.

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