Why We Believe

Jared Halverson spent his doctoral years at Vanderbilt reading the sharpest attacks ever aimed at religious belief, and he walked out with a stronger testimony than he carried in. Today he teaches ancient scripture at BYU and leads Unshaken, a ministry reaching people in faith crisis worldwide. But the test that mattered most was waiting inside his own home. In this episode of Why We Believe, host...

Casey Griffiths has spent his career helping thousands of students face the hardest questions in church history without losing their faith. He is a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, has published dozens of books and articles on the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, co-hosts the Church History Matters podcast, and even holds a Guinness W...

For seven years, Keith Erekson directed the Church History Library, the official archive of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and home to more than 20 million records. He holds a doctorate in history, spent years as a tenured professor in Texas, and wrote the go-to book for members who want to engage their own history honestly. Once people learned what he did for a living, they kept...

Dr. Justin Top has spent his life chasing one question: how does the grace of God actually reach us? He has looked for the answer in places most people never see. He lived his junior year of high school in Jerusalem. He served a mission in South Korea. He taught seminary for seven years, then traded the classroom for a Navy uniform, deploying twice in the War on Terror and later building a spiritu...

Brent L. Top spent 34 years teaching the gospel at Brigham Young University, where he rose to Dean of Religious Education and wrote more than 30 books. For years he had counseled students to cast their burdens on the Lord. Then the relentless weight of leading a mission brought him to a breaking point, and he had to find out if he truly believed what he had taught. In this episode of Why We Believ...

Craig Ostler has spent more than 40 years teaching the Restoration. He taught seminary and institute for 15 years, then 28 years at Brigham Young University, and co-wrote a 1,200-page commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants with Joseph Fielding McConkie. He has photographed and walked nearly every sacred site in early Church history, and he lived in Jerusalem with his family twice. With all of th...

What happens when a photographer feels prompted to delete every song from his computer and throw away all his art books? Mark Mabry did not know it then, but those quiet impressions were preparing him to create Reflections of Christ, the first mainstream photographic depiction of Jesus Christ. In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Mark to hear how his bishop arrive...

Marcus Martins joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1972 at age thirteen, six years before any Black member could hold the priesthood or enter the temple. He stayed anyway. He believed anyway. In June of 1978, when the revelation came extending the priesthood to all worthy male members, Marcus was nineteen, working as a construction inspector in Rio de Janeiro and engaged to b...

A teenager with no religious background walked into the Mesa Arizona Temple visitor center and felt something shift. That single visit led to baptism, a mission to Georgia, and a return home determined to finish college. But Aaron Franklin had flunked out with a 0.96 GPA. What changed wasn't just his academics—it was him. He came home from his mission transformed, finished with a 4.0, and became o...

Dave Lindsay has spent more than 25 years telling other people's faith stories on film, including Front Man: The Alex Boyé Story and four seasons of Come Follow Up on BYUtv. But the testimony that anchors his work began with a sophomore-year bribe. His mom's cousin was his seminary teacher and made him a deal: skip every class, just promise to read the Book of Mormon. Dave took the bribe to dodge...

Daniel C. Peterson has spent his career doing something most people would rather avoid. He goes looking for the strongest arguments against the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, not the weakest ones, and he reads them on purpose. He earned his doctorate at UCLA, reads more than a dozen languages, taught Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University for decades, led the Foundation for Ancie...

Paul Alan Cox grew up the son of a Grand Teton park ranger and a scientist. He graduated from BYU, earned his PhD at Harvard, and was named one of Time magazine's 11 heroes of medicine for searching the world's rainforests for cures that no laboratory had found. President Reagan named him a Presidential Young Investigator. Sweden made him the first King Carl XVI Gustaf Professor of Environmental B...

Scott Anderson's family has been building Utah since 1847, when three of his ancestors walked into the Salt Lake Valley beside Brigham Young. Their homestead site sits beneath Zions Bank Tower today. Scott went on to run that same bank for 25 years as president and CEO, growing it from $3.2 billion to nearly $100 billion in assets while steering it through 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the...

Garrett Batty has spent his career turning faith-based stories into cinema, but the story that shaped him most started in a hospital bed when he was 15. A routine scoliosis surgery had dropped bone chips into his spinal cord and left him paralyzed. The doctors began training him for life in a wheelchair. Lying alone, Garrett whispered a question to his Father in Heaven and asked if a wheelchair wa...

What does a United States Senator say when asked why he believes? For John Curtis, it starts on a mountaintop in Galilee, where at 19 he went 48 hours without food or water and climbed alone to ask if God would forgive him. He walked down certain the answer was yes, and the first to say he would not recommend the method. In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Senato...

Brett Sampson moved 14 times before he ever left home, served a mission in Rochester, New York where the Sacred Grove was part of his assignment, and grew up to help lead one of the most dramatic transformations in Latter-day Saint education. He has served as a stake president, taught public speaking on campus for over two decades, and led University Relations at BYU-Idaho for 26 years. In this ep...

Sarah Norton grew up in a faithful home, served in her community, and believed in Jesus Christ her whole life. But belief became something far deeper the night a stranger walked up to her outside a doctor's office, wrapped her arms around her, and said, "Everything is going to be okay." That was the first of three separate angel moments, each with an identical message sent by God at three of the d...

What happens when the youngest CEO in NBA history finds himself kneeling by his bed in London, begging heaven to save his bleeding grandson? David W. Checketts ran some of the most recognizable sports organizations in the world. He took over the Utah Jazz at 28, led the Knicks to two NBA finals, owned the St. Louis Blues the year they won the Stanley Cup, and built Real Salt Lake from scratch. Thr...

What happens when a Grammy-winning artist wakes up paralyzed from the neck down the day after auditioning for Disney? Adassa Candiani couldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't eat. Doctors had no answers. She went home to die. The next morning, she woke up alive and got the call: she had landed the role of Dolores in Encanto. In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with the...

Brad Wilcox was born on Christmas Day, spent his earliest childhood in Ethiopia, and grew up to write the most-viewed BYU devotional in history. He has served as a mission president in Chile, a member of the Young Men General Presidency, and a BYU professor whose teachings on grace have reshaped how a generation of Latter-day Saints understand the Atonement. In this episode of Why We Believe, host...

A 19-year-old missionary was locked in a customs shed in Fiji with pigs and cows. No one knew where he was. No one was coming. He knelt down and heard his mother's voice praying for him from thousands of miles away, and every fear disappeared. That young man was Elder John H. Groberg, the general authority whose mission to Tonga inspired the movie The Other Side of Heaven. In this episode of Why W...

Eva Timothy grew up in communist Bulgaria where religion was banned, Christmas did not exist, and her father hid a copy of the U.S. Constitution like a treasure. At 14, after the Berlin Wall fell, she saw two missionaries on the street carrying a picture of Jesus Christ. A prompting told her to stop and talk to them. She had never prayed in her life, but at her first church meeting in a rented roo...

How do you find God in your everyday life? Rob Call has spent a lifetime answering that question, and his answer is simpler than you think: you look. Rob has trained himself to spot the hand of the Lord in every chapter of his story, and every time he looks, he finds it. In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Rob to hear how baptizing his little brother at 16 first...

What happens when 17 years of saving other people's lives nearly destroys your own?  Jeremy Claridge spent nearly two decades as a paramedic with his hands in trauma every single day. When severe PTSD brought him to his breaking point, he told his doctor he was done with emergency medicine and that he was going to be a crop duster. His wife looked at him and asked if he was serious. He w...

What happens when a lifelong church member realizes he has never truly tested his own testimony? Jason Barney grew up in a family with roots reaching back to Nauvoo and Joseph Smith himself. He knew the stories. He had the heritage. But when his high school friends asked him point blank if he really believed in Joseph Smith, he walked away unsure. Years later, kneeling in a remote Japanese town on...