SunstonePodcast #001: Sunstone Past, Present, and Future
For those of you who are not aware, we recently published our first podcast at Sunstone, entitled: “Sunstone Past, Present, and Future”.
In this inaugural episode of SunstonePodcast, we interview Mike Stevens, Board Chairman of the Sunstone Education Foundation, and Dan Wotherspoon, editor of Sunstone Magazine. Along with learning a little bit about Mike and Dan, we discuss the past, present, and future of Sunstone.
Click here to listen.
We genuinely welcome your feedback. Please let us know your thoughts about Sunstone, your desires for its future, and any topics or guests of interest you’d like to see in upcoming podcasts.
Thanks for listening! More to come!!!
October 4th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
If you think I seem conflicted about Mormonism now, keep in mind that the way I felt before attending the Sunstone symposium two years ago was more along the lines of tormented. I felt like there was absolutely no place for me in the church anymore. But I found a lot of kindred souls there, and the thing that surprised me was not the state of “apostasy” I’d been expecting, but the fact that many of them were the most dedicated members of the church I’d ever seen. Maybe not in terms of high leadership, but in terms of really loving the religion, and embracing it with their whole hearts and minds. Here were people trying to make this religion real for them, something they could accept without compromising who they were.
I don’t know what the future will hold for me in terms of church partipication, but knowing about Sunstone and associating with some of the great people there gave me a reason to try just a little while longer.
October 22nd, 2005 at 10:21 pm
One of the most interesting tidbits to come out of the interview, I thought, was the suggestion by Dan Wotherspoon that the birth of Correlation in 1961 was the indirect cause of the genesis of independent fora like Dialogue and Sunstone. It seems like dialogue on
things Mormon really is like sand, the tighter grasp the central authority exerts upon it, the more it slips through their fingers.
Personally, I doubt that the main purpose of Correlation was to dampen Mormon dialogue. I do believe the claim that it was, at least on one
level, the attempt to bring everything under priesthood control as inspired by doctrinal perceptions of the role of priesthood. The
unintended consequences are interesting, though.
In considering the effect that Oak’s 1989 talk on “alternative voices” and the later First Presidency statement on “certain symposia” on the Sunstone community, I wonder whether part of what happened was the diversion of attention to the cybersphere. The Sunstone crowd of yesterday may be the cyber-Mormon crowd of today, which, thanks to the anonymity and freedom of cyber-discussions, is free to explore all
territory, from the wildly fundamentalist to the liberal and disillusioned and involves people one would never see in a chapel or a Sunstone symposium.
Since I consider all of it Mormon, I revel in it. I read anti-Mormon, liberal Mormon, fundie-Mormon, ex-Mormonm, and conservative Mormon material in a free mix. It is good that Sunstone is embracing at least
the cyber-approach, if not the unfettered anarchy. They have to be where their target audience has migrated. I, like many others, like a more open-ended conversation I can take part in such as one encounters
in fora like this one.
To revisit another part of the podcast–I would go further than the Sunstone stance as represented in the interview and assert that there has been a multi-pronged attack on intellectual freedom within the Church. One cannot exclude the counsel against study groups, the firing of BYU professors for publicly supporting liberal causes, etc., when trying to contextualize the Church’s efforts to manage its membership and its own image.
I understand the importance of re-integrating Sunstone into the larger LDS milieux, but I must say that the hemming and hawing over whether the LDS Church was really responsible (statements like “it hasn’t been
proven”) for the orchestrated attack on the September 6 is a little disingenuous, and kind of apologetic too. It must be done, I am sure. Sunstone should seek to survive.
But with my cyber-freedom I will call a spade a spade. I would wager that it is nearly statistically impossible that the LDS upper-hierarchy or some component of it was not directly responsible
for the disciplinary action against the September 6. Any other explanation is too complicated to merit serious consideration.
There is perhaps another way to approach the free Mormon dialogue that Sunstone seeks to foster. This comes not by calming the anxious hearts of Mormons who fear participating in something that Elder “So-and-So”
cautioned us against over a decade ago, but by blowing Mormonism wide open. The problem, as I see it, is that Mormonism is traditionally and narrowly defined as co-extensive with the institution of the LDS Church in SLC and its members.
I would like to see a revolution wherein a broader definition of “Mormon” replaces the fears, prejudices, and in-fighting between people who value to greater Mormon tradition in some way. I would like to see Sunstone et al. reach out to the independent RLDS and Community of Christ folks for their perspective. I think we should also take greater interest in people who embrace the Book of Mormon or some other aspect of Mormon tradition but have never considered joining the
LDS Church.
Mormonism is, after all, a cultural phenomenon that reaches beyond the confines of baptism and activity in the LDS Church headquartered in SLC.
This revolution is the wrenching of the concept and name “Mormon” from the authorities who have ostensibly officially rejected it anyways, and taking it for all who embrace it however they may. In the modern
religious marketplace, this approach holds much promise. If there were a place where anyone was free to take any stand on any Mormon issue, conducting themselves respectfully and politely, we might really have something.