Summary
2011 FAIR Conference
The 13th annual FAIR (The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research) Conference was held on August 4 and 5, 2011 at the South Towne Exposition Center in Sandy, Utah.
The FAIR Conference is an annual event that brings together scholars, apologists, and interested individuals from a variety of areas. Each comes with a unique perspective on history, science, or theology, and all come with a desire to help defend the gospel and share evidences of its truth.
Samuel Brown
Seerhood, Pure Language, and Sacred Translation
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Bio
Samuel Brown, MD, is Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Associate in Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah. A Harvard-trained physician and scholar, he researches sepsis and critical illness while also publishing on religious responses to sickness and death, including his book In Heaven As It Is on Earth (Oxford University Press).
Valerie Hudson
A Reconciliation of Polygamy
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Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, specializing in foreign policy, security studies, gender and international relations. A widely published scholar and co-author of Bare Branches and Sex and World Peace, she is a principal investigator of the WomanStats Project and was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers.
McKay V. Jones
Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Blood Atonement Balance Sheet
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McKay V. Jones holds a B.A. in English Teaching from Brigham Young University and has taught secondary English and coached baseball. An active contributor to Latter-day Saint apologetics, he has published multiple papers through FAIR, organized community firesides on key doctrinal topics, and is currently authoring books based on the Journal of Discourses. He serves as a bishop and lives with his wife, Suzanne, and their four children.
Stephen Ricks
The Sacred Embrace in Ancient Egyptian Religion and Art
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Stephen D. Ricks, Ph.D., is a professor of Hebrew and Cognate Learning at Brigham Young University, specializing in ancient Near Eastern religions, the temple, and the Book of Mormon. A former president of FARMS and founding editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, he has published extensively on ritual, temple symbolism, and scriptural texts, and is known for his expertise in Biblical Hebrew and interfaith outreach.
Brant A. Gardner
The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon
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Brant A. Gardner (M.A. State University of New York Albany) is the author of Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon and The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon, both published through Greg Kofford Books. He has contributed articles to Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl and Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community.
Stephen C. Harper
Four Accounts and Three Critiques of Joseph Smith’s First Vision
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Steven C. Harper is Associate Department Chair of the department of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. Brother Harper earned his Ph.D. in early American history from Lehigh University. He taught religion and history at BYU-Hawaii before joining the faculty in Provo and becoming an editor of the Joseph Smith Papers in 2002.
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Newell G. Bringhurst, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at College of the Sequoias. A past president of both the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association, he is the author or editor of nine books on Mormon history, including Scattering of the Saints and The Mormon Quest for the Presidency.
Cynthia J. Lange
Borders & Boundaries: The Immigration Fervor that Threatens to Divide Us
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Bio
Cynthia J. Lange is managing partner of the Northern California office of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen and Loewy, a world-wide firm specializing in immigration law. She leads the firm’s High Tech practice in the heart of Silicon Valley, directing the strategic representation of companies ranging from large Fortune 500 companies to small start-up companies. She has worked with numerous companies to set up and manage worldwide immigration compliance programs. Cynthia is a long-time Adjunct Professor at Southwestern University School of Law where she has taught since 1988. She also frequently lectures on corporate immigration and, as a thought leader in the industry, has written numerous articles on business immigration law matters. Cynthia is also the Managing Partner in charge of Fragomen’s I-9 Service Center, which offers state of the art electronic I-9 tools and advisory services for proper I-9 and E-Verify completion. She specializes in government investigations, audits, and establishing compliance programs for companies. Cynthia has also worked at the U.S. Department of Justice as an INS trial attorney.
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Roger is a native of the San Francisco Bay area. He currently works as the Marketing Communications Manager for a high-tech semiconductor equipment company based in northern California. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1985 and a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University in 1993. Roger is married, has five children and is currently serving as the Sunday School President in his ward.
Roger became involved with FAIR in April 2008 when he became an editor and administrator on the FAIR Wiki after spending several years editing LDS-related Wikipedia articles. Since that time he has worked to restructure and expand the FAIR Wiki in order to make it as comprehensive and easy to navigate as possible. He received FAIR’s “John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award” at the 2009 FAIR conference in recognition of these efforts, and his Wikipedia experience was featured in the Deseret News article “Wiki Wars: In battle to define beliefs, Mormons and foes wage battle on Wikipedia,” in January 2011.
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Don Bradley is a writer, editor, and researcher specializing in early Mormon history. Don recently performed an internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and is completing his thesis, on the earliest Mormon conceptions of the New Jerusalem, toward an M.A. in History at Utah State University. He has published on the translation of the Book of Mormon, plural marriage before Nauvoo, and Joseph Smith’s “grand fundamental principles of Mormonism” and plans to publish an extensive analysis, co-authored with Mark Ashurst-McGee, on the Kinderhook plates. Don’s first book, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Missing Contents of the Book of Mormon, is slated to be published by Greg Kofford Books in September.
Paul Fields
Book of Mormon ‘Wordprint’ Analysis: How to do it wrong…and how to do it right
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Paul J. Fields, PhD, is a consultant specializing in research methods and statistical analysis. He has worked with the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship on stylometric and authorship attribution studies of the Book of Mormon and other documents related to the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He received his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University. During his academic career he was on the faculty of the United States Naval Postgraduate School and Brigham Young University.
Ugo Perego
Joseph Smith, the Question of Polygamous Offspring, and DNA Analysis
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Ugo A. Perego is a senior researcher with the non-profit Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation and a consultant for GeneTree.com, both located in Salt Lake City. He received a BS and a MS in Health Sciences from Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) and a PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Pavia (Pavia, Italy). In his eleven years with the Foundation, Ugo has supervised the worldwide collection of more than 110,000 DNA samples and corresponding genealogical records, while giving nearly 200 lectures on DNA topics relating to personal ancestry, history (including LDS history), and population migrations. Ugo has also authored and co-authored a number of publications, including the recent: “Joseph Smith, the Question of Polygamous Offspring, and DNA Analysis” (in The Persistence of Polygamy, 2010); “The Book of Mormon and the Origins of Native Americans from a Maternally Inherited DNA Standpoint” (in The Farms Review, 2010); “The Initial Peopling of the Americas: A Growing Number of Founding Mitochondrial Genomes” (in Genome Research, 2010); “Mitochondrial DNA: A Female Perspective in Recent Human Origin and Evolution” (in Origins as a Paradigm in the Sciences and in the Humanities, 2010).
Ugo is married to Jenna and they are the parents of three boys and a girl.
Daniel C. Peterson
Mormonism, Islam, and the Question of Other Religions
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A native of southern California, Daniel C. Peterson received a bachelor’s degree in Greek and philosophy from Brigham Young University (BYU) and, after several years of study in Jerusalem and Cairo, earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Peterson is a professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at BYU, where he has taught Arabic language and literature at all levels, Islamic philosophy, Islamic culture and civilization, Islamic religion, the Qur’an, the introductory and senior “capstone” courses for Middle Eastern Studies majors, and various other occasional specialized classes. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Islamic and Latter-day Saint topics–including a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God (Eerdmans, 2007)—and has lectured across the United States, in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and at various Islamic universities in the Near East and Asia. He served in the Switzerland Zürich Mission (1972-1974), and, for approximately eight years, on the Gospel Doctrine writing committee for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also presided for a time as the bishop of a singles ward adjacent to Utah Valley University. Dr. Peterson is married to the former Deborah Stephens, of Lakewood, Colorado, and they are the parents of three sons.
Speakers
Don Bradley, Newell G. Bringhurst, Samuel Brown, Paul Fields, Brant Gardner, Steven C. Harper, McKay V. Jones, Cynthia J. Lange, Roger Nicholson, Ugo Perego, Daniel C. Peterson, Stephen D. Ricks, Valerie M. Hudson.
Topics
Kinderhook Plates, Mormonism and Politics, Seerhood and Sacred Translation, Book of Mormon Wordprint Analysis, Book of Mormon Translation, First Vision Accounts, Blood Atonement, Immigration and Church Policy, Collaborative Editing in LDS Apologetics, DNA and Polygamous Offspring, Mormonism and Islam, Sacred Embrace in Ancient Egyptian Religion, Polygamy and Doctrine.
John Taylor Award
Each year, FAIR awards the John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award to a volunteer who made meritorious contributions to FAIR’s mission and outstanding personal efforts in helping defend The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In 2011, the John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award recipient was Ken Kyle.