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Mormon Stories Podcast

718: Heidi and Josh Packard’s Mormon Transition Pt. 2

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2017

⏱️ 65 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

SUPER honored/proud to release my latest interview with Heidi Nielson Packard and Dr. Josh Packard. This powerful, informative, and in-depth interview covers:

  • Heidi and Josh’s very orthodox Mormon upbringing and early years as Mormons. For those interested, Heidi’s brother is Christian Nielson, who is married to Stephanie Nielson of the NieNie Dialogues blog (sister to Courtney Clark Kendrick or CJane)
  • Their faith crisis involving science and LDS history (reading Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling), which resulted in Josh asking to be released from the bishopric,
  • How Heidi and Josh found value in secular humanism as a way to raise their children after Mormonism,
  • How the military community has helped to meet there social needs after leaving Mormonism, and
  • How they overcame early “mistakes” in communicating with believing family, resulting in more loving, respectful relationships with believing family members today.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely

0:04.3

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0:08.4

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0:11.8

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0:16.7

the right side of the page under Support. All contributions to Mormon

0:20.4

Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and

0:24.6

building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for

0:29.3

supporting.

0:33.7

Be kindly light a myth in circling glue.

0:43.2

Leave out me on the night is dark. Okay, so should we jump into now kind of

0:52.7

when things started unraveling? Kind of how many years into your marriage did

0:57.2

that start? Well, it started in medical school. So we got married in 96. So four

1:06.6

years. Okay, and this is five years before Mormon Stories started. So you guys

1:11.1

were you were hitting this early. This is around the same time I was having my

1:14.7

faith crisis at Microsoft. So around 2000, 2001. Yeah, around 2000, 2001. What

1:20.8

happened? So I would say that my first faith crisis was kind of the many

1:24.9

faith crisis that happened when we were at medical school. One of the things

1:30.6

was I was just was bumping into a lot of non-mormons that seemed very

1:34.0

functional, very happy families in the military, outside the military,

1:39.8

religious people, non-religious people. It was the first time that I got out of

1:44.4

really the Mormon bubble and started to notice that there's not a lot of

1:49.0

Mormons out here on the East Coast and a lot of them seem to be pretty darn

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