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Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John DeLin.

It is December 19, 2017 and we are now conducting the second interview of the day. We just did a wonderful interview about the LDS Church's ecclesiastical policies in terms of how bishops and state presidents and mission presidents are interviewing their youth and children about matters of sexuality.

I'll check that out if you haven't that series. But now it's time to interview someone who has made quite a stir over the past year or two within the Mormon intellectual community.

His name is Jackson Washburn. Jackson is a 19 year old faithful Mormon who has yet to serve a mission for the church. He attends Arizona State University.

I just have to say that I'm both excited for this interview in a tiny bit disappointed in some of my listeners.

As many of you know, Mormon Stories is committed to interviewing people all along the faith spectrum.

We interview people who are critical of the church and who attack the church and who don't believe in the church anymore.

We've also had a long history of interviewing people who are faithful to the church.

For one of the first times in the history of Mormon Stories, I've had several people reach out to me and tell me that I shouldn't interview Jackson Washburn.

In addition to that, as many of you know, I've been doing an ongoing series over the past month or two on this notion of meal apologetics.

So the church has this long history of apologetics where they have people defending the church.

And we've had people like Daniel Peterson and others on people from fair to talk about defending the church.

But what we've seen in the past several years with tarot givens and Fiona Givens with Richard Bushman with Patrick Mason with several other prominent believers in Mormonism academics.

We've seen a different approach to apologetics, which is a more pastoral approach, one that's willing to validate and acknowledge the difficulties within Mormonism, one that relies less on ad hominem attacks, and frankly, one that relies less on the need for science to be used to defend what some feel is indefensible.

This interview of Jackson very much aligns with this series that I've been doing on Mormon meal apologetics.

We'll be talking about how Jackson even feels about that term and how he looks on plastic versus modern apologetics.

So that's important. But another reason why Jackson's interview is super important is because, you know, over the past 10, 12 years as as Mormon Stories podcast as the CES letter as Mormon think.

As various intellectual movements, sandstone and dialogue, Mormon history association have been influencing the LDS church, resulting in things like, you know, changes in the LDS church's curriculum, also the gospel topic essays with the Mormon church as they've been released.

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