Today I participated in a panel discussion about how to make peace with challenging questions in Church history. I joined Claire Haynie Brown and Aly Conteh who shared personal wisdom and personal experiences. A writeup in the Deseret News quoted me as follows . . .
On resources for studying Church history:
People are typically suspicious when they hear Erekson works in church history, he said. Someone will say, “Oh, I’ve heard of you guys. You hide the church’s history. You don’t want people to know about the church’s history.”
“And I usually answer with a big ‘yes, that’s exactly our goal. And I’m going to tell you where we hide things so that no member will ever find them. … We found this place called the gospel library app.’”
Erekson went on to reference and describe resources readily available in the app, along with the recently completed Joseph Smith Papers project.
On dealing with difficult topics:
“We don’t know everything,” Erekson said, encouraging people to “not feel surprised or disappointed or betrayed” when challenging things come up in church or world history.
“These are people that God is dealing with,” he said — citing the revelation introducing the Book of Mormon as containing “a record of a fallen people and the fullness of (the) gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“It’s both of those. I can’t just have the Book of Mormon without the war chapters. I can’t see the miracles of Jesus without comprehending the woman who had an issue of blood for 12 years.”Report ad
This is a pattern he says goes “all the way back to the Garden of Eden, where God tells us that’s how you’re going to learn you are going to taste the bitter, so that you know how to prize the sweet.”
