• Answers need to include not only refutation of false ideas, but affirmations of true concepts.
• We need to not only respond with evidences against the arguments of our critics but arguments in favor of the hope that is in us.
• We need to help members interpret their religious world in the light of true principles including those that allow for mistakes.”

The text of Brother Lynch’s address can be found 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. John is currently the Young Men’s President for the Los Gatos Ward, Saratoga California Stake.

In this episode of Best of FAIR, Wendy Ulrich, Ph.D., observes: “In my experience, neither critics nor apologists for the Church do much to convince me whether or not to believe. Debates, analysis, and scientific evidence may alternately undermine or support my beliefs, but belief itself is a choice I wrestle God for, somewhere in a dark swampland of my inner landscape, where not only God’s credibility but my own are at stake.

….

“I have noticed that many of the people I have known who have left the Church did not do so because they believed too little, but because they believed too much. In their excessive idealism, they have held Church leaders or God to expectations which were inevitably disappointed, and they have felt betrayed. They have not believed God when He told them that ours is a lonely, dreary world where we will surely die, and they have chosen instead to believe another version of reality, one which claims that they can be protected from being molested, disappointed, or made afraid. They have been angry at God or other Church leaders for not keeping promises which God has not, in fact, made. I note with interest that of all the names for the Savior in holy writ, He is never called the Preventer. Agency is the plan, and this means that all of us, including Church leaders, learn by our mistakes and are subject to misinformation, blindness, hubris, and error. The old joke is too often true: In the Catholic church everyone says the pope is infallible but nobody believes it; and in the Mormon church everybody says the prophet is fallible but nobody believes it.

“When Christ asks the question of His remaining disciples, ‘will ye also go away?’ it seems to be in recognition that they may be feeling betrayed or disillusioned by His words and requirements, as others were. Their response is not brimming with irrational enthusiasm. They seem to say, somewhat wistfully, as if recognizing that perhaps leaving would be an easier choice, ‘to whom, Lord, shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.’ We do not leave because we are blind to the challenges or brainwashed into commitment, but because we will have more cognitive dissonance, more to explain to ourselves, if we leave. We have found here things that we hold dear, that support and enrich our lives. We, like the reluctant disciples of old, have found here words of eternal life, which is to say that we have found knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. These relationships, these pearls of great price, are worth the sacrifices and the disappointments and the askance looks of our friends who wonder what we could be thinking.”

Wendy Ulrich, Ph.D., was a psychologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan for 20 years before moving to Montreal, Quebec for a three-year mission. She has served as president of the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists, has authored numerous professional articles in both psychology and business, and has done consulting and training for such corporations as Marriott, Johnson & Johnson, University of Michigan, General Electric, and United Way. Dr. Ulrich is founder of Sixteen Stones Center for Growth in Alpine, Utah, providing seminar-retreats for LDS members seeking personal and spiritual growth and development. She and her husband have three children.

Dr. Ulrich is the author of the book Weakness is Not a Sin. The full text of Dr. Ulrich’s talk can be found at Fairlds.org.

He shares his thoughts on the idea of inoculating the saints against anti-Mormon arguments. In providing an inoculation, can we be sure we know what disease, or argument, each individual will be exposed to? Is it possible that we may do more harm than good in administering the wrong inoculation? He contrasted inoculations with transfusions. The Gospel Principles manual is designed “not [to] inoculate but transfuse into the lives of the Latter-day Saints the fundamental faith in the fundamental gospel restored through the Prophet.” If people know the Church is true, then they will be strengthened against the attacks of anti-Mormon arguments when encountered.

The full text of this address can be found at FAIR LDS.

Robert B. White, Q.C., served a mission in Eastern Canada after which he returned to Edmonton and received degrees in finance (with distinction) and law (with distinction and the Silver Medal) at the University of Alberta. He is a senior partner and litigation practice group leader in a large, multi-national law firm with offices across Canada and in Japan. Robert works exclusively in trials and appeals and loves the law. He is listed in each of the three published, peer reviewed “Best Lawyers in Canada” lists. He was hired as an adjunct professor in law while in my third year of law school, and while practicing he taught for 18 years. He has written four law books, all published by Canada Law Book, with a second edition of one under way. Robert has served in many Church positions, including bishop, stake president, and area seventy. He is married to Lonni. They have six children and twenty grandchildren.

Claudia Bushman asks, is the self sacrifice motif for women in the Church so strong that no interest and care should be taken about their own lives? She observes that “too many women in the church live passive lives. We cannot afford to do that. We have talents to multiply.”

She also addresses the role of feminism in the Church. Only a few years ago, she told a Salt Lake Tribune writer that feminism was dead and that the word itself had become so frightening that the movement was now moribund and extinguished. She nevertheless, acknowledges that there are still “many old self-described LDS feminists around.” In fact, she considers herself to be a feminist and said “I doubt that many people would disagree with my definition of feminism, that the talents of women should be developed for the benefit of their communities, their church, their families and themselves.” By this definition, the Relief Society organization itself is a feminist organization. “Mormon women find emotional support and personal and spiritual growth there. The Relief Society, even in its curtailed form, provides a network for us to know, teach, and befriend each other. In Relief Society we are encouraged to exercise that most important feminist strategy, reaching beyond our patriarchal structure to a personal relationship with deity through which we can discover our own personal revelation and destinies.”

She adds: “Without autonomy, women would seem to have little power in this religion. But what is power in religion? Leadership seems important, but many religions, certainly ours, have stressed the humble vineyard worker as the powerful position. The greatest of all is the servant of all.”

She concludes by asking, what can women hope for from the Church? She states: “Women should realize that the Church is a great enabler, not a hindrance. The Church provides a wonderfully welcoming arena for working out our own ideas and building our talents as we seek for and follow our own revelation.”

The full text of Sister’ Bushman’s address can be found here.

Claudia L. Bushman holds degrees in literature and American Studies from Wellesley College, Brigham Young University, and Boston University and now teaches history and American studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. Dr. Bushman is the author and editor of ten books including Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, Building the Kingdom (with Richard Bushman), and Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America, as well as a variety of other American history books. She was the founding editor of Exponent II. Dr. Bushman is married to Richard Lyman Bushman and is the mother of six. Having held all the usual Church positions, she now finds most of her Church work off the books in such areas as chairman of the Harlem Bridge Builders committee, producer of the Manhattan Temple Jubilee at Radio City Music Hall, and chairman of the committee to install a statue of Joseph Smith near Wall Street in New York in honor of his 200th birthday.

The full text of this address can be found at FAIR LDS.

David Stewart, M.D., was raised in Massachusetts and Maryland. He was a presidential scholar at Brigham Young University, graduating with summa cum laude honors in molecular biology in just two years. He received his medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine in 1999. He completed surgical internship and orthopedic surgery residency at the University of Texas Medical Branch and completed fellowship training in pediatric orthopedic and scoliosis surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Dr. Stewart is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society and has received numerous awards for excellence in clinical practice and medical research and for his contributions to international health. He is fluent in several Eastern European languages and is active in international medical charity and education work in Eastern Europe and Asia. He served a full-time LDS mission in Russia and has written on LDS topics including church growth, missionary work, and DNA and the Book of Mormon. He lives in Las Vegas with his wife and young children.

Brother Martins is the author of the book Setting the Record Straight – Blacks and the Mormon Priesthood, which can be purchased at the FAIR Bookstore.

The full text of this address can be found at FAIR LDS.

Confronting information that seems to question the truth claims of the Church can create cognitive dissonance. “When we encounter cognitive dissonance with weighty issues—such as religious beliefs—we can experience a very uncomfortable and emotional state of mind. This discomfort has been called a “negative drive state” because it causes psychological tension almost like hunger or thirst and requires immediate attention and resolution. Reducing this distress may require a change in belief or behavior. There are at least four ways in which this is generally accomplished, and we are not often consciously aware of doing so. We will either: (1) reject the new information—the competing cognition—as false; (2) reject the new information as unimportant; (3) reject old beliefs in favor of the new information; or (4) add information (additional cognitions) to validate the original belief.”

Ash goes on to explain, “When critical information destroys conclusions based on straw men or false assumptions, some members will lose their entire testimonies. The most common misconceptions that seem to factor into personal apostasy include: (A) Unrealistic Expectations of Prophets (B) Confusing Tradition With Doctrine (C) Imposing Our View on Others (D) Unrealistic Expectations of Science and Scholarship”

He concludes with some thoughts on inoculation against shaken faith syndrome: “While adding cognitions may salvage damaged testimonies, a change in paradigms before encountering challenging issues often serves as an inoculation against shaken faith syndrome. Inoculation, however, can also cause damage on its own.”

The full text of this address can be found at FAIR LDS. You can also watch the video of this presentation on YouTube.

Brother Ash is author of the book Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt, as well as the book, of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith. Both books are available for purchase online through the FAIR Bookstore.

Daniel Peterson is the author of many books and articles, including Offenders for a Word, which is available, along with other talks by Brother Peterson, at the FAIR Bookstore.

Tell your friends about the FAIR-Cast. Share a link on your Facebook page and help increase the popularity of the FAIR-Cast by rating it in iTunes.

The text of this address is available here. Brother Arnett’s pamphlet, “Defending the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, A Reference Guide,” can be purchased at the FAIR Bookstore.

On a popular level, the folk apologetic has been accompanied by misleading statistics that downplay the rates at which plural marriage was practiced. A corrected ballpark figure has 15-20% of married Mormon men engaged in the practice during the Deseret era. Speculation runs rampant that a shortage of males was created by persecution caused deaths. However, such casualties were more likely to because of forced winter marches and hence not skewed towards one of the genders.

Despite these shortcomings and dismissal by many who consider themselves properly informed, it turns out that the original assertion is correct. There was a shortage of Mormon men! I will not only establish that below, but I will also advance two solid hypotheses on why the shortage existed.

In an earlier essay, I took a shot at explaining the lack of a “lost boys” phenomenon in 19^th century Utah. Looking at the 1880 Census data, I found that Utah women were being married much more efficiently than their US peers, while Utah men eventually married at about the same rate as their US peers. Utah demographics were found to support high rates of plural marriage for men because 1) Utah women were married efficiently, 2) Utah had a relatively high rate of natural increase creating a wide population pyramid, and 3) under these Utah conditions, increasing the age gap between spouses created an artificial surplus of women.

That analysis likewise presents a rationale for suspending plural marriage. In today’s world we observe increased life expectancies, delayed entry into marriage to pursue educational opportunities, greater economic independence for women, large age gaps between couples becoming less acceptable, and less importance placed on having large families. Of course, whether in 19^th century or now, it is necessary for a polygamous community to isolate itself from the dominant values of its ambient society.  However, inasmuch as Mormon fundamentalists practice arranged marriages and outcast young single men to sustain plural marriage, they appear be addressing a shortage of female marriage partners on levels that their Deseret era predecessors did not.

In my zeal to refute old anti-Mormon accusations that Deseret era missionaries specifically targeted female converts to bring them captive to polygamous harems in Utah, I resisted the notion that missionary work facilitated polygamy. I reasoned that converts would be equally male and female and that older couples would not contribute to natural increase as much as, say, a second generation Mormon. Subsequent investigation of statistics such as those tabulated below shows that a significant surplus of women emigrated to Utah as the fruits of missionary, but their presence is masked the presence of non-Mormons (a small ~20% of the population with a large marriage-aged male disparity [4]) and the rising second generation of Mormons (birth rates make a large % of the population and slightly favor males).

Anti-Mormon Propaganda

Table 1. Sex Ratios and Marriage Statistics [5]

In the first column of the table, overall sex ratios SR are reported. For example, there were roughly 104 males for every 100 females in the US in 1880. The sex ratio at birth has historically ranged from 102-106 [6]. However, other factors besides native births contribute to the overall sex ratio. For regions in the US, migration played a significant role. Horace Greeley’s admonish “Go west, young man” appropriately captures the demographic of a migrating individual. There was more than 2:1 male to female ratio in the frontier mountain states (NM had been settled a while longer and was thus more family friendly).

The second column uses Kathryn Daynes’s range for prime marrying age sex ratio (PMASR) of 15-29. She found that PMASR was generally more favorable towards women in 1860, 1870, and 1880 census years (93, 100, 105) than the overall sex ratio (101, 99, 107) [7]. As a slight refinement, I calculated a staggered prime marrying age sex ratio (SPMASR) as well: (86, 86, 90). SPMASR compares the number of males aged 20-34 to females aged 15-29 [8]. This helps capture the five year difference in male and female ages at first marriage (estimated in the 4^th and 5^th column by the singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM )). Finally I calculated the SR (96, 97, 101) and PMASR (87, 94, 100) for foreign borns [9] in Utah for comparison with my classification of almost 90,000 names in the Mormon Immigration Index CD.

The adoption of plural marriage prevented a disaster.  As seen above, a moderate surplus of Mormon women and an overwhelming surplus of non-Mormon men would have made large numbers of inter-religious marriages virtually inevitable. For some Mormon females, plural marriage was a much better option than remaining single for life (like many of their west European peers did) or marrying outside her faith.  Interfaith marriages, like other assimilating influences, were important to avoid while young Mormon religious community tried to establish its own identity.

Two Hypotheses

The surplus of Mormon women was the fruits of missionary work, especially in western Europe. The pre-dominance of women in the Mormon Immigration Index can be explained by a combination of two hypotheses.

1.      The demographics of converts will match the demographics of their ambient society.

2.      Women join new, charismatic religious movements in disproportionate numbers.

While the 1^st hypothesis is a default assumption, the 2^nd hypothesis was presented by none other than Rodney Stark [10]. He wrote:

The ancient sources and modern historians agree that primary conversion to Christianity was far more prevalent among females than among males. Moreover, this appears to be typical of new religious movements in recent times. By examining manuscript census returns for the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bainbridge (1982) found that approximately two-thirds of the Shakers were female. Data on religious movements included in the 1926 census of religious bodies show that 75 percent of Christian Scientists were women, as were more than 60 percent of Theosophists, Swedenborgians, and Spiritualists (Stark and Bainbridge 1985). The same is true of the immense wave of Protestant conversions taking place in Latin America.

As judged by Mormon Immigration Index results, western Europe convert sex ratios take on an intermediate value between their ambient countries (represented by Sweden and England in the table above) and the lofty numbers Stark collected for other religious movements. Mormon missionaries were instructed to let God select the elect and warned about specifically targeting attractive on at least one occasion. One might speculate that plural marriage diminished some enthusiasm among European women to convert to Mormonism.   If greater numbers of women had converted without plural marriage, it would have been very difficult to accommodate them in harsh, frontier Utah.

In conclusion, a Mormon male shortage in Utah in consistent with the 1) the assumption that non-Mormon demographics in Utah follow that found in other frontier western states and 2) foreign converts contributed a significant amount to Mormon demographics and were moderately stacked towards women. The Deseret Saints believed that plural marriage was commanded by God, while not fully comprehending the reasons why. Even if it is stretch to argue that divine foresight anticipated and prepared for frontier conditions in the Kirtland era, providing for the spiritual and physical welfare of the surplus female converts at least seems like a positive side effect.

Notes

[1] John Widtsoe wrote in Evidences and Reconciliations: “Plural marriage has been a subject of wide and frequent comment. Members of the Church unfamiliar with its history, and many non-members, have set up fallacious reasons for the origin of this system of marriage among the Latter-day Saints.

“The most common of these conjectures is that the Church, through plural marriage, sought to provide husbands for its large surplus of female members. The implied assumption in this theory, that there have been more female than male members in the Church, is not supported by existing evidence. On the contrary, there seem always to have been more males than females in the Church. Families — father, mother, and children — have most commonly joined the Church. Of course, many single women have become converts, but also many single men.

“The United States census records from 1850 to 1940, and all available Church records, uniformly show a preponderance of males in Utah, and in the Church. Indeed, the excess in Utah has usually been larger than for the whole United States, as would be expected in a pioneer state. The births within the Church obey the usual population law — a slight excess of males. Orson Pratt, writing in 1853 from direct knowledge of Utah conditions, when the excess of females was supposedly the highest, declares against the opinion that females outnumbered the males in Utah. (The Seer, p. 110) The theory that plural marriage was a consequence of a surplus of female Church members fails from lack of evidence.”

[2] I am looking in your direction, i4m.com

[3] I highly recommend Hales’s website http://www.josephsmithspolygamy.com/ to my readers.

[4] Dean May estimated 21% of Utah’s 1880 census population was non-Mormon Dean L. May, “A Demographic Portrait of the Mormons, 1830-1980,” in After 150 Years: The Latter-day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective, edited by Thomas G.”Alexander and Jessie L. Embry, Charles Redd Monographs in Western History No.”13 (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books for Charles Redd Center for Western Studies) p. 51, 67 cited in Kathryn Daynes, “Single Men in Polygamous Society: Male Marriage Patterns in Manti, Utah” in Journal of Mormon History 24 (Spring 1998), p. 89-111

[5] The tabulated values for US, Utah, and Mountain States sex ratios come from Volume 1. Statistics of the Population of the United States available at http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1880.html . For the same areas SMAM and never married % come from IPUMS. For Sweden sex ratios come from data provided by http://www.scb.se/Pages/ProductTables____25809.aspx, while ancestry.com was used to extract the same for England. SMAMs for the two countries provided by Michael R. Haines, “Long Term Marriage Patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present,” National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA), NBER Working Paper Series, (Historical Paper No. 80. 1996):15-39.  Guinanne, Timothy W., 1997, The Vanishing Irish: Household Migration and the rural Economy in Ireland,1850-1914. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. p. 96. Sex ratios for Mormon immigrants used the Mormon Immigration Index CD and relied on sites like nordicnames.com to classify gender.

[6] by Lee L. Bean, Geraldine P. Mineau, Douglas L. Anderton , Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation p. 79 This fact suggests caution against the folk wisdom that women will out-number men in the Celestial Kingdom thus justifying a rationale for widespread polygamy in the afterlife. For a more devastating critique, see Valerie Hudson Cassler, “Polygamy” SquareTwo 3:1 (2010)

[7] Daynes also finds evidence for a surplus of Mormon women in the predominantly Mormon community of Manti PMASR (84, 81, 89) and in endowment records (77, 73, 83)

[8] The idea to use a staggered range for men and women occurred to me after reading Joshua Angrist, “How Do Sex Ratios Affect Marriage andLabor Markets? Evidence from America’s Second Generation” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002, v107(3,Aug) . Angrist uses a more appropriate range for the early 20^th Century with a smaller SMAM gap (men: 20-35, female: 18-33). I used ancestry.com’s census search capabilities to break down Utah’s population by sex and age.

[9] I again used ancestry.com and estimated the number of foreign-born by subtract US-born from the total. However this classifies unrecorded birthplaces as foreign which makes my estimates on the conservative side. In 1860, Utah territory included counties that were later annexed to Nevada (Carson, St. Mary’s, and Humboldt) and Wyoming (Green River) that I eliminated. However, I did not eliminate counties that straddled later state boundaries. This means that Utah’s actual sex ratios are slightly lower than the figures I provide, but probably not more than 1%.

[10] Rodney Stark, “Reconstructing the rise of Christianity: The role of women” Sociology of Religion.  Fall 1995.  Vol. 56,  Iss. 3,  p. 229

William Schryver’s presentation on the Kirtland Egyptian Papers received some press before the conference, and did not disappoint. You can view it here. (A browser plug-in may be required.)

There have been articles about many of the presentations published in Mormon Times, Deseret News, and LDS Church News:

• FAIR conference: Same-sex marriage and the role of religion
• FAIR conference: Secret Mormon codes and Egyptian papers
• FAIR conference: LDS doctrine clear on divinity of one God
• FAIR conference: ‘Gender equality is the brick of Zion,’ speaker says
• FAIR conference: What if the U.S. president were a Mormon?
• FAIR conference: Joseph Smith’s discovery of ancient patterns
• FAIR Conference: Roper’s take on Book of Mormon geography
• Mormons need to work to increase favor
• FAIR conference: Defend the Book of Mormon by studying names, origins
• Nibley editor says scholar was bolstered by research
• ‘Be Ready’ to Defend Faith

Transcripts will be posted at http://www.fairlds.org when they are ready. MP3s and DVDs will be made available for purchase at the FAIR bookstore.

As a reminder, “If you have been called to teach a quorum or class using [the Gospel Principles] book, do not substitute outside materials, however interesting they may be. Stay true to the scriptures and the words in the book. As appropriate, use personal experiences and articles from Church magazines to supplement the lessons.” (“Introduction,” Gospel Principles, (2009), pg. 3.) The resources provided here are not meant to replace or supplement the prescribed lesson material, but are for use in personal study and to help provide background knowledge for answering any issues that may arise in class.

The Scriptures Are Available to Us Today
Open canon vs. closed canon
Supposed contradictions in the scriptures
The Mistakes of Men: Can the Scriptures be Error-Free?

The Bible
The Corruption of Scripture in the Second Century
As Far as it is Translated Correctly: The Problem of Tampering with the Word of God in the Transmission and Translation of the New Testament
FAIR wiki
FAIR Topical Guide

The Book of Mormon
Joseph the Seer—or Why Did He Translate With a Rock in His Hat?
Science and the Book of Mormon
Mormon’s Editorial Method and Meta-Message
A Real People, Time, and Place: Contextualizing the Book of Mormon
A Social History of the Early Nephites
The Gadianton Robbers in Mormon’s Theological History: Their Structural Role and Plausible Identification
Changes in the Book of Mormon
Nephi’s Neighbors: Book of Mormon Peoples and Pre-Columbian Populations
The Children of Lehi: DNA and the Book of Mormon
DNA and the Book of Mormon
Monotheism, Messiah, and Mormon’s Book
The Case for Historicity: Discerning the Book of Mormon’s Production Culture
Explaining Away the Book of Mormon Witnesses
Debating the Foundations of Mormonism: The Book of Mormon and Archaeology
The Protean Joseph Smith
Arabia and the Book of Mormon
FAIR wiki
FAIR Topical Guide

The Doctrine and Covenants
I Don’t Have a Testimony of the History of the Church
Dispelling the Black Myth
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Plural Marriage* (*but were afraid to ask)
The Reliability of Mormon History Produced by the LDS Church
FAIR Topical Guide – Blacks and the Priesthood
FAIR wiki – Blacks and the Priesthood
FAIR wiki – Polygamy
FAIR Topical Guide – Polygamy
FAIR wiki – Doctrine and Covenants
FAIR Topical Guide – Doctrine and Covenants

The Pearl of Great Price
Revised or Unaltered? Joseph Smith’s Foundational Stories
Book of Abraham 201: Papyri, Revelation, and Modern Egyptology
The Larger Issue
The Message of the Joseph Smith Translation: A Walk in the Garden
Adam in Ancient Texts and the Restoration
FAIR wiki – First Vision
FAIR Topical Guide – First Vision
FAIR wiki – Pearl of Great Price
FAIR Topical Guide – Pearl of Great Price

Words of Our Living Prophets
Statements by Church leaders
Revelation after Joseph Smith
Journal of Discourses
FAIR Topical Guide

Studying the Scriptures
The Impact of Mormon Critics on LDS Scholarship
The Fallacy of Fundamentalist Assumptions
“Uh oh!” to “Ah ha!” in Apologetics: 20/20 Foresight for a Faithful Future in Defending the Church
Spiritual Experiences as the Basis for Belief and Commitment
“Believest thou…?”: Faith, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Psychology of Religious Experience
What I Learned about Life, the Church, and the Cosmos from Hugh Nibley

Beth T. Spackman, “In 3 Nephi 19, we read that some Nephites prayed to Jesus. Is it proper to pray to him?,” Ensign, June 1988.

Are we allowed to pray to our “Heavenly Mother?”

Praise in Prayer and Song

Moroni’s promise

Gaylen Hinton, “I need help in praying for and receiving guidance and personal revelation.,” Ensign, October 1993, 60.

Burning in the bosom

Blake T. Ostler, “Spiritual Experiences as the Basis for Belief and Commitment,” 2007 FAIR Conference.

If your commenting on your own blog or other site, please feel free to link to it here.

• John Lynch, “‘Uh oh!’ to ‘Ah ha!’ in Apologetics—20/20 Foresight for a Faithful Future in Defending the Church”
• Brant Gardner, “Joseph the Seer, or Why Joseph Translated with a Rock in His Hat”
• Ron Hellings, “Joseph Smith and Modern Cosmology”
• Matthew Brown, “Brigham Young’s Teachings on Adam”
• Greg Smith, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Plural Marriage (*But Were Afraid To Ask)
• Richard Sherlock, “Mormonism in the Public Square”
• Daniel Peterson, “The Temple as a Place of Ascent to God”

If your commenting on your own blog or other site, please feel free to link to it here.

• Wade Miller, “Science and the Book of Mormon”
• Vickey Taylor, “The Sariah Dilemma: Finding Increased Faith When Our Children Misplace Their Own”
• John Gee, “The Larger Issue”
• Ugo Perego, “Haplogroup X in Light of Recent Book of Mormon Claims”
• McKay White, “The Kirtland Safety Society: The Myths, the Facts, and the Prophet’s Good Name”
• Ron Barney, “The Reliability of Mormon History Produced by the LDS Church”
• Robert White, “On Being An Apologist: Imperatives, Predicaments, Perils, and Blessings”

If you haven’t preregistered and you live in the Salt Lake area, at-the-door registration will be available both days. Video streaming is also being offered for $20. Details available at FAIR’s conference web page.

The FAIR blog will have an open thread for conference participants to comment on the talks. Check back tomorrow!