Why We Believe

Night after night on the Broadway stage, Sandra Turley sang the part of a rescued child. As Cosette in Les Miserables, the final one of the original Broadway company, she lived inside a story of a girl swept out of misery by Jean Valjean and carried while being asked only to trust. Somewhere in those years, the role turned into a mirror. Sandra realized she was Cosette, and her Rescuer was Jesus C...

At a White House dinner, Gary Herbert rose to toast President Obama, and his goblet held water. As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Utah's 17th governor would not raise wine, even in that room, and what the President did next told him his quiet witness had been seen. Gary led Utah for nearly 12 years, through wildfire, earthquake, and a pandemic, and his faith in the Lo...

Ali Essig walked into the emergency room and found her husband slumped in a wheelchair, mid-stroke at 37, staring back at the very promise she could not shake. His patriarchal blessing said he would be blessed with health as he lived the Word of Wisdom, and now that promise sat across the room in a hospital gown. Ali had spent years working on Capitol Hill as communications director for Congressma...

Jonathan Tavernari grew up a Catholic altar boy in São Paulo, coached by his own mother, one of the most decorated youth basketball coaches in Brazilian history. At 16 he boarded a one-way flight to America with his mother's gold cross around his neck, and he left BYU as the program's winningest player and its all-time leader in three-pointers made. But the turning point of his life was not a cham...

For twenty-one years, Ross Nielson felt like God had passed him by. His parents divorced when he was seven, and the promise he kept hearing in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that families are forever, felt like it belonged to everyone but him. Painful experiences with someone he trusted only deepened the walls he put up. He believed there was a God, yet he could not remember ever...

Bronco Mendenhall picked his college for one reason. BYU was on the schedule, and he wanted to beat them. He got his win in Provo and lay spread-eagle on the Y. Years later, sitting at a stoplight while the radio named the coaches BYU wanted instead, a still, small prompting told him he would lead the program himself. Days later, the self-described last resort was named head coach of the only foot...

What does a behavioral economist studying retirement savings have in common with a wizard battling darkness? More than you might think. Bridget Madrian spent 25 years at Harvard Kennedy School researching how people make financial decisions. Her work shaped pension law across America and influenced hundreds of millions of people worldwide. But at the peak of her career, she made an unexpected choi...

Vince Biegel had every reason to believe football would define him. Named after Vince Lombardi and raised on a hundred-year-old family cranberry marsh in Wisconsin, he earned two-time All Big Ten honors and six NFL seasons with the Green Bay Packers, the New Orleans Saints, and the Miami Dolphins. Then the injuries came. Seven surgeries. A roster cut by the team he grew up loving. An Achilles tear...

Chris Crowe got a book as a breakup gift. The girl he loved wanted a temple marriage he could not give her, so she said goodbye and handed him a black paperback on her way out. He tossed it in his locker and forgot it. Months later, alone in his bedroom in Tempe, Arizona, he opened it and read Joseph Smith's account of the First Vision. There was no vision and no jolt, just a quiet certainty that...

Most comedy earns its laughs by tearing something down. Jenna Kim Jones built her career doing the opposite. She left Utah for New York University, landed on the staff of The Daily Show, and learned to make a room laugh without tearing people down. Her jokes stay clean because her hope is real, and that hope reaches back to her faith in Jesus Christ. In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan...

Justin Kunz's art lives in the nation's permanent record. He has designed gold coins and Congressional medals for the United States Mint, including the $100 American Liberty Gold Coin and both sides of the medal honoring the secret World War II Ghost Army. Before that, he helped build the visual world of World of Warcraft as a senior artist at Blizzard Entertainment. Today, he teaches in the illus...

Corey Lindley became a CFO at 32, took a company public, ran Greater China from Hong Kong, and served as CEO of doTERRA, a company doing well over $2 billion a year. Then he walked away at the height of it. He says his faith in Jesus Christ has been the one North Star guiding every decision of his life. In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Corey to trace that fait...

Kirby Heyborne is the face of a generation of Latter-day Saint film. The RM, The Best Two Years, Singles Ward, Saints and Soldiers. He has narrated more than two thousand audiobooks and won two Odyssey Awards, and today he serves as a bishop. But the applause once shook him, and he had to learn where a testimony really belongs. In this episode of Why We Believe, Kirby tells host Nathan Gwilliam ho...

Decades ago, Nathan Gwilliam was the CEO of a publicly traded dot-com company when the bubble burst and he watched $11 million disappear in a single day. The company was gone. A few nights later, the bookkeeper showed up at his house and quit. He had no money to replace her and no clear idea what to do next. That is the kind of storm that sinks a person. Nathan opens this episode inside a differen...

Patrick Mason has spent his career inside the hardest questions of Latter-day Saint history, the ones that shake other people's faith. He holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, and he wrote the book many bishops, stake presidents, and parents now hand to members walking through doubt. But this episode is not really about his scholarship. It is...

Jeremiah Cronin was born in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served a two-year mission in Monterrey, Mexico, and came home with a testimony he had earned on his knees. Then he drifted. One skipped prayer, one closed scripture at a time, until a slow wandering became nearly twenty years away from the Church and from Jesus Christ. An Army National Guard veteran, photographer, and fat...

Sian Ann Bessey has written around 40 books. She is a USA Today bestselling author and a Whitney Award finalist whose novels carry her native Wales onto the page. But the book she trusts most is one she did not write. As a working novelist, she knows what it takes to build a story, and she is certain Joseph Smith could not have built the Book of Mormon without God. In this episode of Why We Believ...

On an early morning run, with her heart praying the way it always did, Michelle Kaufusi heard a voice tell her she would be the mayor of Provo and that she would not do it alone. No woman had held that seat in the city's 166-year history. She had been raised by a single mother as what felt like the only divorced family in the whole county, working as a young girl to help put money on the table. Th...

Dallyn Vail Bayles has one of the most recognized tenor voices in Latter-day Saint music. He has sung the Phantom on a national tour of Phantom of the Opera, led Les Mis as Enjolras, made his Carnegie Hall debut, performed at the Kennedy Center, and stood beside the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. Then a call came from New York offering him the Phantom tour again, right as rehearsals began for...

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...