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Apologetics

FAIR Voice Podcast #6: How to be an Apologist

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Please register for the FairMormon Conference that is on August 5-7. It’s a great opportunity to support FairMormon, hear from amazing speakers, and ask questions directly to speakers!

So you want to defend the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Noble cause, worthy effort, totally worth your time– here’s a basic beginner’s guide on how to get started.

Hanna Seariac

Hanna Seariac is a MA student in Greek and Latin at Brigham Young University. She is writing a book on the history of the priesthood and another one that responds systematically to anti-LDS literature. She works as a research assistant on a biblical commentary and as a producer on a news show. She values Jesus Christ, family, friends, hiking, baking, and good ice cream.

FairMormon Conference Podcast #58 – Elder Bruce C. and Sister Marie K. Hafen, “Faith is Not Blind”

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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming. (Use coupon SPRING2020 and get the entire conference for $10!) We are also now selling tickets to the 2020 (Virtual) FairMormon Conference!

Elder Bruce C. and Sister Marie K. Hafen, Faith is Not Blind

Their book by the same name is available from the FairMormon Bookstore. This presentation will also be featured in a Facebook video stream this Sunday, May 24, at noon MDT.

Bruce Hafen grew up in St. George, Utah. After serving a mission to Germany, he met Marie Kartchner from Bountiful, Utah at BYU. They were married in 1964.

Elder Hafen received a bachelor’s degree from BYU and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Utah. After practicing law in Salt Lake City, he went to BYU as a member of the original faculty of BYU’s Law School. He taught family law and constitutional law.

He served as the President of BYU-Idaho from 1978 to 1985. Then he was Dean of the BYU Law School and later served as the Provost—the second in command—at BYU. He was called as a full-time General Authority in 1996, serving in area presidencies in Australia, North America, and Europe. He also served at Church headquarters as an adviser to the Priesthood Department, the general auxiliary presidencies, Church History, and the Temple Department. He became an Emeritus General Authority in 2010 then served as president of the St. George Temple. More recently he served as Chairman of the Utah LDS Corrections Committee, overseeing the Church branches in Utah’s state prisons and county jails. He is the author of several books on gospel topics, including the biography of Elder Neal A. Maxwell, and books on marriage, the temple, and the Atonement—including The Broken Heart and Covenant Hearts.

Marie K. Hafen is a homemaker and teacher. She has a Master’s Degree in English from BYU and has taught Shakespeare, freshman writing, and Book of Mormon at BYU-Idaho, the University of Utah, and BYU. She was also on the Young Women General Board, the Board of Directors of the Deseret News, and was matron of the St. George Temple. She has edited and co-authored books with her husband, including The Contrite Spirit and, most recently, Faith Is Not Blind.

The Hafens have seven children and 46 grandchildren.

Book Review: The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture

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Available from the FairMormon Bookstore

Most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have probably never thought of the Pearl of Great Price as controversial. The Book of Mormon, yes—it has been under attack practically since the night Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith. Yet, Givens and Hauglid [1] use this book to argue that the Pearl of Great Price is even more so. Unfortunately, the majority of the effort goes into attempting to prove the point, and it leaves the book less than faith-promoting. It does have some bright spots, however.

The book begins with the assertion that “without the Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ would lose its principal evangelizing tool and its most conspicuous sign of Smith’s prophetic vocation but relatively little of its doctrine.… With the Doctrine and Covenants, the church would lose a good bit of its ecclesiology—organization templates and guidelines for church government and its offices—but would not suffer a devastating loss of the deeper theological underpinnings of its faith.” [2] I found these statements to be very surprising. The Book of Mormon has enough unique doctrine in it for Tad Callister to devote an entire chapter of his recent book to it, and in several places Givens admits that doctrine found in places like the Book of Moses was first taught in the Book of Mormon. In addition, the Doctrine and Covenants contains a great deal of unique doctrine, in spite of the removal of the Lectures on Faith (which the book points out is commonly thought to have been the Doctrine of the Doctrine and Covenants). A comparison of our edition with that of the Community of Christ shows some of what would be missing without it.

The book goes on to make its point: “Mormonism, in other words, is absolutely inconceivable apart from this collection of scriptural texts that provided the faith’s theological core from the beginning but only received canonical recognition in 1880. At the present moment, controversies regarding multiple accounts of Smith’s ‘First Vision,’ as well as the origins of the text of the Book of Abraham, have brought unprecedented attention to this hitherto largely neglected work. The consequence is that the Pearl of Great Price represents at one and the same time the greatest vulnerabilities and the greatest strengths of the Church of Jesus Christ.” [3] As I argue below, this is quite an overstatement. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture

FairMormon Conference Podcast #44 – René Krywult, “Fear Leads to the Dark Side: How to Navigate the Shallows of (Mis)Information”

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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

René Krywult, Fear Leads to the Dark Side: How to Navigate the Shallows of (Mis)Information

Transcript available here.

René Alexander Krywult, a native of Vienna, Austria, Europe, has been a member of FairMormon for over eighteen years and has been instrumental in founding the German-speaking FairMormon group. He is a software developer and project manager for a European financial institution. He is married to Gabriele Krywult, and they have four children and three grandchildren. His first publication was “Mormon Deification Compared to Orthodox Christian Theosis” in the magazine Spirituality in East and West of Dialog Center International, a Protestant network of organizations engaged in researching new religious movements. More articles on the FairMormon website followed. He organized four FairMormon conferences in Germany from 2009 to 2015 and spoke at all of them.

Rene’s particular focus is on comparing the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with those of both traditional Christians and the early Christian centuries. He had his first contact with anti-Mormonism at age 14, and from that time on one of his major interests has been to understand how anti-Mormon literature works, how to discern the reliability of information provided, and how to grow in faith while studying arguments made by the opposition.

Brother Krywult served, among other callings, as ward Sunday school president, ward mission leader, elders quorum president, Seminary and Institute teacher and counsellor in a bishopric: Currently he serves as a High Councilor in the Vienna-Austria Stake. His native language is German.

Audio Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

FairMormon Conference Podcast #43 – Scott Gordon, “CES Letter: Proof or Propaganda?”

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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference held last month. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Scott Gordon, CES Letter: Proof or Propaganda?

Transcript available here.

Scott Gordon serves as President of FairMormon, a non-profit corporation staffed by volunteers dedicated to helping members deal with issues raised by critics of the LDS faith. He has an MBA from Brigham Young University, and a BA in Organizational Communications from Brigham Young University. He is currently an instructor of business and technology at Shasta College in Redding, California. Scott has held many positions in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints including serving as a bishop for six years. He is married and has five children.

Audio Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

FairMormon Conference Podcast #36 – Elder Craig C. Christensen, “Foundations of Our Faith”

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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference that was held last week. You can still purchase the video streaming if you would like to watch all the presentations.

Elder Craig C. Christensen, Foundations of Our Faith

Elder Craig C. Christensen was sustained as a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on October 5, 2002. At the time of his call he was serving as a member of the Fifth Quorum of the Seventy in the Utah South Area.

As a General Authority, Elder Christensen served as President of the Mexico South Area from 2003 to 2007 while living in Mexico City. He has also served in various departments and assignments at Church headquarters, such as Executive Director of the Priesthood and Family Department. He is currently serving in the Missionary Department.

Elder Christensen graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. He went on to earn a master of business administration from the University of Washington. Over the years, he has been a visiting instructor of business and religion courses at several universities, including Brigham Young University.

At the time of his call as a General Authority, Elder Christensen was a self-employed businessman in the retail automotive, insurance, and real estate development industries. He previously worked as an executive with several privately owned companies and with an international accounting and consulting firm based in San Francisco, California.

Elder Craig C. Christensen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 18, 1956. He married Debbie Jones in March 1978. They are the parents of four children.

Audio and Video Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

Book Review: If Truth Were a Child: Essays

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Available from the FairMormon Bookstore

George B. Handley is a humanities professor at Brigham Young University. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MA and PhD from UC Berkely. This book, part of the Maxwell Institute’s “Living Faith” series, is a collection of personal essays he has written about “the seamlessness of humanities and belief, intellect and faith” (page XI).

Handley explains in the preface that “What keeps me in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint and what keeps me working at living according to its principles is the fundamental fact that I accept the tenets of my faith as plausible, compelling, and deeply moving. They make sense to me intellectually. More importantly, they have taken root in my very being as a result of acts of faith that brought personal witnesses of the gospel’s spiritual truths” (page XII).

There are several essays that I particularly enjoyed. In “Why I Am a Christian,” he says “We talk of sin as a deliberate rejection of God, but sin often feels to me more like being a slave to myself, unable to escape my own psychology, genes, upbringing, habits, or personality even and especially when I am aware that life calls me to better habits and deeper commitments” (page 3). He further explains, “nothing has given me more confidence in the living reality of Jesus Christ as the Redeemer and resurrected Son of God than the way that my trust in him has converted my awareness of my insufficiencies into hope, into a palpable increase of love for myself, for others, and for life itself that is beyond my natural instincts…. A willingness to repent and then to declare my faith has opened me to deeper appreciation for the meaning and power of Christ’s atonement” (pages 4-5). He also makes the important distinction that “Christ’s pure love is not the same thing as blanket tolerance for all human behavior or belief” (page 7). [Read more…] about Book Review: If Truth Were a Child: Essays

FairMormon Conference Podcast #28 – John Lynch, “Strengthen Thy Brethren: Bolstering Those in Faith Crisis”

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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. Please join us for the 2019 FairMormon Conference coming up August 7-9! You can attend in person or purchase the video streaming.

John Lynch, Strengthen Thy Brethren: Bolstering Those in Faith Crisis

Transcript available here.

John Lynch is a Silicon Valley sales and marketing executive specializing in high-tech startup ventures. He is a member of the Board of Directors of FAIR and serves as its Chairman. Having served in many missionary callings, including twice as a Stake Mission President, multiple times as a Ward Mission Leader, and having worked at the Provo Missionary Training Center as a teacher and trainer, John has seen the impact of both well-prepared and poorly prepared defenders of the faith.

Audio Copyright © 2018 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

Book Review – Who is Truth? Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith

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Available in the FairMormon Bookstore

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). We take this literally for the words “way” and “life,” but what if we also took it literally for the word “truth”? In their book Who What is Truth? Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith, that is exactly what authors Jeffrey L. Thayne and Edwin E. Gantt encourage us to do, changing our way of thinking from truth as an idea (this turns out to be rooted in Greek philosophy) to truth as a person (Hebrew thought).

The chapter headings give a good summary of what is covered: “What if truth is a person?,” “The ancient roots of person-truth,” “Faith in ideas, or faithfulness to a Person?,” “Knowing God vs. believing ideas about Him,” “Person-truth does not give us control,” “Knowing person-truth through covenant,” “Our on-and-off relationship with person-truth,” “What it means to be an authority on truth,” “The archnemesis of person-truth,” “What is sin, if truth is a person?,” “Rethinking the atonement of Christ,” and “Person-truth in a world of science and reason.” There is also a conclusion chapter, a list of further readings, and appendixes with more on Greek and Hebrew thought and questions and answers.

I was initially skeptical when offered this book to review. But it claimed to offer help for those having a faith crisis, and to strengthen faith in Jesus Christ and the Restoration, so I thought it would be worth a look. I was pleasantly surprised, and found myself agreeing with the conclusions (the good fruit being brought forth), even as I am still processing the explanations that led up to them. The authors anticipated skepticism, and they addressed all the potential red flags that came up in my mind as I read. [Read more…] about Book Review – Who is Truth? Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith