Hello and welcome to a special edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Delin.

We have a special announcement, right, Scott and Kendall? Yes, we are announcing the

the 2012 Phoenix, Arizona 480 is the Erie code. Mormon Stories conference to be held on February 17th

through 19th. Woo-hoo! Yes, hooray. Oh! All right, Scott, let's start with the theme. What's the theme?

The theme is re-creating community with the re- and parentheses. So we just wanted to emphasize that,

you know, we're here as a community that Mormon Stories is a safe, open place for anyone,

regardless of their belief. Here in Phoenix, we've got a really good group, a strong group of

believers, of non-believers, of people who are in transition, and it's just really welcoming,

and we wanted to share that, and we wanted to make that part of our idea. So all of our,

all of our speakers, everything that's going on with the conference, we're going to try to focus

on what we can do to re-create community and to build these kind of communities of support,

and hopefully be kind of a model for other regional groups. Yeah, Phoenix is absolutely that.

And, you know, that doesn't mean there aren't bumps along the way, but if you, you know,

I was at Houston this last week, and it was so amazing. You know, we had this story sharing

meaning at the end, which is kind of like a testimony meaning, but it's not traditional in the

sense that you can just share whatever your truth, you know, whatever you love, or story, or

truth, or whatever you want to share. It was so beautiful to have people bear their testimony

about the truthfulness of the church, about the falseness of the church, and it didn't matter,

because there was this spirit of, we don't care what your beliefs are necessarily. We just

want to enjoy what we share in common, and actually just prove that there can be this community

of authenticity and of open sharing that transcends the lines of belief or disbelief or orthodoxy.

Is that what you guys are going for, Kendall? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I liked how you said earlier,

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