Another conference has come and gone! Each year they seem to go by more quickly, even when more is added (besides going for 3 days, we also had a special Thursday evening presentation). We were glad to be able to have 300 people in attendance at our new venue after having an online-only event last year. We also did have a streaming option, which you can still take advantage of by purchasing one of our on-demand viewing options.

As always, there was a wide range of topics. This year they included subjects such as polygamy, Book of Mormon authorship, LGBT issues, women and the priesthood, the Wilford Woodruff papers, and how to discern between truth and fiction. Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, gave an excellent presentation to his first Latter-day Saint audience. You can view the full list of presentations in the conference program here.

Each day we did a free public stream of one presentation. On Wednesday, it was “Let’s Talk About Polygamy” by Brittany Chapman Nash.

Thursday evening Stephen Smoot spoke about “An Egyptian Context for the Book of Abraham” in a special session sponsored by The Interpreter Foundation.

And on Friday John Gee did an impromptu presentation, “Lessons on Doing Apologetics,” in place of Steven Mayfield, who had been scheduled to speak about “The Mormon Murders – The Hoffman Forgeries” but was unfortunately unable to attend due to COVID.

 

Each year the John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award is given to a deserving FAIR contributor. Hanna Seariac was the recipient this year. Among other things, she has brought back the FAIR podcast, and really jumped in to helping when she joined FAIR just over a year ago. You can see some of her contributions here.

We had many people give generous donations, and for that we are very grateful. We’d also like to thank our sponsors: B. H. Roberts Foundation, The Interpreter Foundation, 1820 The Musical, The Warren Family, BYU Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, White Elegance, Leading Saints, and Book of Mormon Central. Without the donations and the sponsors, the conference would not have been possible.

More pictures from the conference can be seen on our Facebook page.

Dan Peterson has written summaries of each day of the conference:

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