Sunstone Podcast

In this episode, Zina Bennion and Sara Hanks talk about their journeys from being Mormons to being witches, and how their upbringing still affects the way they practice and believe now. This episode was recorded at the 2019 Sunstone Summer Symposium. https://sunstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/SLP-124.mp3

  https://sunstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/SLP-123.mp3 It would probably surprise both the prophet Mormon and Dustin Lance Black to know how much they have in common. In this episode, Stephen Carter shows how the similarities between Under the Banner of Heaven and the the Book of Mormon should encourage Latter-day Saints to give the television series a chance.

How important is the “historical” in historical fiction? Three historians, Barbara Jones Brown, Bryan Buchanan, and Cheryl Bruno, talk with Stephen Carter about the historical inaccuracies in Under the Banner of Heaven and whether they were worth it.

Mormon fundamentalism plays a shadowy, menacing part in Under the Banner of Heaven. This episode gathers Vicki Darger, Benjamin Shaffer, Shirlee Draper, and Moroni Lopez Jessop, all either current or former fundamentalists, to talk about the realities of current-day Mormon fundamentalism, temple ceremonies, blood atonement, and polygamy.

Lindsay Hansen Park interviews two actors who took on iconic Mormon roles for “Under the Banner of Heaven”: Tyner Rushing as Emma Hale Smith, and Scott Michael Campbell as Brigham Young. Did one of them really end up in Relief Society one Sunday?

Stephen Carter and his ex-Mormon brother walked into the Washington DC Temple open house, and what they saw on the walls changed the way they perceive the LDS Church forever. No ex-Mormons were re-converted in the making of this episode.

In this episode, S. Richard Bellrock argues that the LDS proselytizing mission hits all the right buttons at all the right times to be a bona fide instance of hazing, with both hazing’s benefits and drawbacks.

Most Mormons are suspicious of postmodernism. But Mormon apologists have actually made use of it to defend the faith. How in the world did they do it? Will it backfire? Taylor Petrey takes us on a tour of this fraught relationship in this 2019 Sunstone Summer Symposium recording.

Stephen Carter believes that a Canadian horror film holds the key to escaping any faith crisis. But will it turn you into a zombie?

In this episode, scholar Reza Aslan examines how the idea of gods arose in human evolution, was gradually personalized, endowed with human traits and emotions, and eventually transformed into a single Divine Personality. This episode was recorded at the 2019 Sunstone Summer Symposium.