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Hello everyone who's listening out there on Facebook. This is Dan Weatherspoon on the host of the Mormon Matters podcast and with my good friend in a long time conversation partner John Dillin.

Welcome John here the host of Mormon Stories.

It's good to see Dan it's good to be here. Thanks for making this happen. I'm excited.

You bet I'm glad that we're going to be co-releasing this podcast together through both of us and we're looking forward to having some online participation from those who are tuning in.

We are really excited today to talk about a topic that in some ways has is very controversial and it has like this nasty taste in its mouth.

And it's the term apologetics or it's the act of defending the faith and it's so often maligned and people say, oh no I'm not an apologist and I'm avoiding that label.

Others embrace it but for the most part it's sort of become a pejorative term in many ways for many people.

And I think the main reason for that is that for so many it's like apologetics is only done when you already know the answer and no matter what you're going to work your way to get that answer justified or you know short up or something like that.

And it doesn't feel like an open ended discussion but there's much more to it than just that.

And so we're going to talk today about the role of apologetics within Mormonism, the history of it a little bit, but then mostly with John leading that part of the discussion later.

We're going to talk about apologetics and the way it's being done today.

So along with John and I we have Brian Birch with us who's the head of the center for the study of ethics at Utah Valley University is a fellow Claremontor with me.

A couple of years behind me there at Claremont and we got to know each other there and we've been great friends and even look often partner since so Brian welcome.

Thanks for having me down and Patrick Mason welcome as well you are the Claremont Howard W Hunter chair of Mormon studies and how many years now three four six.

Oh my God.

Time flies.

Yeah and you're even the head of the whole school of religion right now the on the dean of the school of arts and humanities which are religion and things so.

And busy guy thanks for taking some time with us.

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