Faith Matters

Each year, thousands of teens travel the world to build classrooms, health centers, and homes alongside local communities, guided by a simple motto: Love God. Love People. Phones stay home, the work is hard, and the projects are built to last. Along the way, many teens find lifelong friends, a deep sense of belonging, and a firsthand experience of Jesus’s gospel of love. Last year alone, participa...

Bishop Karen Oliveto was just eleven years old when she felt a powerful spiritual call to ministry, and her Methodist congregation lovingly nurtured that call as she grew. But years later, as a young seminary student, she found herself facing something she had long tried to ignore: her sexual orientation. She pored over scripture, shed endless tears, and wrestled with God. And she says that when s...

It was just over a decade ago that I experienced a profound season of doubt. I began questioning nearly everything I’d believed, and the spiritual practices that had sustained me felt completely empty. Scripture especially became painful to engage, a reminder of my unbelief. Where I’d once found comfort and connection, I now found spiraling questions and fear. Discovering the work of today’s guest...

Today we’re sharing a conversation with Paige Crosland Anderson, an award-winning abstract artist who wrote a beautiful essay for Wayfare Magazine’s special Advent issue . Paige builds her paintings in layers: she paints, paints over the paint, sands everything down, and paints again until the piece emerges often in unexpected ways. She suspects our lives work in a similar way; from the studio to...

Today we’re excited to welcome back Thomas McConkie to celebrate a new season of another Faith Matters podcast he hosts: One Heart, One Mind . Together, we dig into the story of Mary and Martha, which he recently explored in an episode there . Drawing on decades of contemplative practice, Thomas’s read of this story is that it may be inviting us to discover the kind of presence that allows us to c...

If Isaiah has ever felt impenetrable, start here. With Come, Follow Me taking us into Isaiah over the next couple of weeks, we’re sharing a special crosspost from Proclaim Peace , which is another Faith Matters podcast that we produce with Mormon Women for Ethical Government. In this episode, Jen and Patrick sat down with Reverend Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners , a Christian nonprofi...

Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chaves from Faith Matters. Maybe some of you relate to the stomach-dropping feeling I get when I’m asked to speak in church. If you’re anything like me, those 12 minutes can loom over your whole week. Today, Ben Crosby and Isaac Richards join us to talk about how to give a talk! How to prepare and deliver a talk with confidence and share a message that will be nourish...

Today, we decided to bring back one of our favorite conversations with Casper ter Kuile, because he'll be joining us this next week, September 24th through 26th, at Restore:Connect.  Casper has spent years exploring the changing landscape of spiritual life in America, especially the new ways that people are finding belonging, meaning, transformation, and even sacredness as traditional religio...

Today we're joined by Colette Lafia, a spiritual director, poet, and author whose newest book  Leaving the Shore: Experiencing Poetry as Prayer  invites us into a different way of meeting the divine than we might be used to. Much of our faith language often centers on effort—perseverance, pressing forward, fighting the good fight. Colette offers a somewhat gentler direction: the idea that rel...

Today we're joined by John White, a theologian and ethicist who is currently Research Fellow at BYU's Maxwell Institute  — and who has a fascinating and unexpected story that led him to convert to the Church just under a year ago. For over a decade, John was a tenured professor of practical theology and ethics at Baylor's Truett Theological Seminary, where he directed the graduate c...

Today we’re bringing you a session we loved from last year’s Restore with Thomas McConkie . There’s a particular overwhelm I know that often comes with learning something new—a low-grade worry that I’m already missing something, forgetting the important pieces, not going to be able to hang onto it all. When it comes to personal development or spiritual truth, that worry can feel especially high st...

This week, we're asking: how do you fit a full Sunday School lesson into twenty-five minutes? Our worldwide church is shifting to shorter lesson blocks, and teachers everywhere are feeling nervous. Isaiah in 25 minutes? What do you cut, what do you keep? Today we're sitting down with Patrick and Melissa Mason to think through this transition and to really embrace it as an invitation to c...

Most of us can probably recall a verse or two from the book of Psalms—something comforting, or words inside a hymn we know. But Psalms is the longest book in the Bible, and tucked inside this same book of scripture are psalms of rage, cursing, and despair that are a lot harder to make sense of. Today, Dr. Ellen Davis joins us to talk about this ancient, essential book, and describes the Psalms as...

Job is probably one of the most difficult and haunting books in scripture, and this summer as we read it together, we wanted a guide—so we invited Mike Petrow back to join us. With doctoral degrees in psychology and mythological studies, Mike helps us understand Job as an ancient text, and as a story that continues to speak in our own lives. Today Mike takes us straight into one of the most striki...

When Dallin Zimmerman was four years old, he memorized every Article of Faith. As a teenager, he studied Portuguese and Spanish, and had long been the family's peacemaker — a bright, fun-loving light that people gravitate toward. Today he's serving a full-time mission in South America. And at thirteen, years before any of that, he sat down with his parents and asked a question that would...

Today we’re honored to share a conversation with Peter Wehner . We want to acknowledge that this conversation explores territory that is going to feel personal, political, and, probably at some points, challenging. Our hope that it creates honest and faithful wrestling where where we need it. Today, we explore what it means to follow Jesus in a time when political identities increasingly compete w...

Today we’re pulling out one of our favorite episodes from the archives.  Our guest is Pete Enns, a well-known bible scholar and the Abram S. Clemens professor of Bible Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania. In recent years, Pete has become well known for several highly popular books, including How the Bible Actually Works , The Bible Tells Me So , and the book we discussed with him in this...

Today we’re joined by two thoughtful therapists, teachers, peacebuilders, and friends, Amanda Ford and Melissa Mason. Together with their spouses, Patrick Mason and Chad Ford, Melissa and Amanda have dedicated years to the work of building peace in families, communities, and faith spaces. But in this conversation, they invite us to consider the foundation of all lasting peace: the quiet, often dif...

Today we’re joined by Ryan Burge, one of the country’s leading data analysts on religion and politics, to talk about his new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us . For decades, we’ve measured the decline of American religion by empty pews and shrinking membership rolls. Ryan invites us to see another, deeper loss. As modera...

As we approach America's 250th birthday, we're reminded that every generation inherits the responsibility of shaping the nation's future. At a moment marked by fear, division, and distrust, the invitation to become peacemakers has never felt more urgent. Today, we're sharing a powerful message from Patrick Mason, that he shared at our Restore Gathering at Utah Valley University...

Today we're delighted to share a conversation with Robin Ritch about her new book, Using Friction to Grow: Stories of Strength and Resilience . Many of us spend our lives trying to avoid friction. We want our faith to feel clear, our communities to feel supportive, and our spiritual lives to move forward without too much tension or uncertainty. But today Robin's asking, "What if our...

Today we’re sharing a special conversation courtesy of our friends at Lift+Love . This is a conversation recorded at their first ever Gather Conference in 2023, the world’s largest Christ-centered gathering of LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and those who love them. In this session, two men sat down together: Tom Christofferson and Darius Gray. Both are devoted Latter-day Saints who know what it is to lov...

Today we’re honored to share a special session from Restore 2025 featuring Steven Kapp Perry , Alisha Anderson , and Ben Schilaty —three gay Latter-day Saints who have each taken different paths, and who share a deep commitment to following God with honesty, courage, and faith. In this on-stage conversation, Steve, Alisha, and Ben share personal and vulnerable reflections on what it means to seek...

This week, wards across the United States will be having a really unique 5th Sunday discussion centered on the Constitution, moral agency, and peace-building. So today, we wanted to reshare a conversation that originally aired in 2021. In this episode, Faith Matters co-founder Bill Turnbull joins Judge Thomas Griffith, an expert in constitutional law, to explore the Constitution and the rapid eros...

They call him the Mr. Rogers of farming, and I think you’ll understand why.  Karl Ebeling spent 33 years as a chemical engineer before feeling an undeniable pull back to the land and to a childhood love of farming that had never really left him. He combined his love of the earth with desire to help and heal and founded Eden Streets in 2020, a community farming initiative that helps individuals rel...