Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast, where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship.

I'm Rosalind Welch, Associate Director at the Institute.

This season, we're exploring the questions we should be asking.

Thanks for joining us.

Forgiveness is a central commandment for any man or woman who chooses to walk the way of Jesus Christ.

But so is the Christian responsibility to protect the vulnerable.

What happens when two commandments, like the commands given to Adam and Eve in the garden,

come into conflict with one another?

Can we protect the innocent and fully forgive the repentant?

As our Mother Eve demonstrated, spiritual dilemmas like this call

for our courage, our creativity, and our faithful trust in God's power. On this episode of the

podcast, I interview Dr. Brigham Franson, Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University.

Brigham happens to be my little brother, but I've looked up to him almost my whole life

for his intelligence and his goodness and his athleticism, something I was not blessed with.

I invited Brigham on the show because I was curious about what disciple's

scholarship looks like in quantitative or technical disciplines. Most of my guests this season have

been scholars of the humanities, history, philosophy, literature, things like that. It's not hard to draw connections between those

fields and the faith that we share. But are the methods and findings of economics, engineering,

and mathematics equally relevant to the gospel? I think Dr. Franzen shows convincingly that they are. Brigham shared with me

an economics paper looking at the effects of certain policies aimed at rehabilitating ex-offenders

by making it easier to get jobs after they've served their time. But those policies turn out to have unintended consequences

that may harm employment opportunities for certain groups with clean records. So how do we

...