Patrick Q. Mason: Working Through Our Doubts and Creating Space for Others to Do the Same

All In

DB Podcasts

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Faith is a gift and a precious commodity in any age, but an increasingly rare one in our modern world," Patrick Mason writes in his book, "Planted." It is for this reason that Mason also states that, "How we deal with doubt in the Church today is one of the most pressing tests of our collective discipleship." That is not limited to how we approach our own doubts but also how we seek to be compassionate toward others as they face their own doubts.

Note: "Planted" was published prior to the emphasis on using the full name of the Church. Please excuse any reference to "Mormonism" as a result.

"This is one of the reasons why God restored the Church in the modern age, because he knew precisely the ways that our social bonds would erode in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the Church is one of the great answers for that. So is it hard sometimes? Yeah, but I think one of the great aspects of the restoration is the we're put in wards that are geographically defined, we do not choose who we go to church with. And that puts us in company with people of different classes, different races, certainly different genders. People have different life experiences, people that we would never choose to associate with. That's the laboratory of love. That is the school of discipleship. That's what's going to make us as Christians."

Show Notes:

2:42- Why Address Doubt?

4:40- Faith: An Individual Experience

8:00- Fortifications

11:46- Faith That Grows With Us

16:00- Hanging On To What We Do Know

18:32- Peaks and Valleys

21:37- A Test of our Collective Discipleship

28:44- Creating Space For Honesty

33:40- Fallibility

39:15- A Church That Hangs On To Us

41:53- Different Disciples

45:05- The Holiest Thing That Presents Itself To Our View

47:30- Grateful To Be A Latter-day Saint

48:48- What Does It Mean To You To Be "All In" the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We often think of doubt as a negative thing, but in Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Talking
0:06.7	with Strangers, he says, doubts are not the enemy of belief, they are its companion.
0:13.6	After writing and publishing his book, planted Patrick Mason explained his intent and writing.
0:20.2	He said,
0:21.2	I intend planted to be part of a grown-up conversation among grown-ups and what I hope is a grown-up
0:28.0	religion. Perhaps more than anything, I fear the juvenileization of Mormonism in which
0:34.4	our religious knowledge and understanding often seems to be trapped somewhere between early
0:40.4	morning seminary and EFY, however wonderful those things are when you're a teenager.
0:45.9	Our religion should grow up with us, how we read scriptures when we are seven should change
0:51.5	by the time we are 17, then again by the time we are 47 or 77. The same is true of how we think
0:59.2	about prophets or church history or any number of other gospel topics. The principles of simple
1:05.5	addition are no less true once we learn calculus, but you can't build bridges or fly to the moon
1:12.0	with grade school arithmetic. Adults can and should be sensitive about the proper time and place
1:18.5	to have certain conversations, but just because a particular conversation perhaps shouldn't occur in
1:24.8	missionary discussions or even gospel doctrine class doesn't mean it shouldn't occur at all.
1:31.1	Planted is my small attempt to foster more conversation within Mormonism.
1:36.8	Patrick Q. Mason is the Leonard J. Arington chair of Mormon history at Utah State University.
1:43.6	He was previously the Howard W. Hunter chair in Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.
1:50.2	He earned both masters and doctorate degrees from Notre Dame. He has addressed Latter-day St.
1:56.0	Culture and Doctrine in media outlets including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
2:01.8	Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, ABC News, NPR and PBS.
2:08.1	This is All-In, an LDS living podcast where we ask the question, what does it really mean to be
	...

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