Summary
2003 FAIR Conference
The 5th annual Mormon Apologetics Conference sponsored by FAIR (The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research) Conference was held in August 2003 at Utah Valley State College (now Utah Valley University) in Orem, Utah.
*Note: the actual schedule from the 2003 FAIR Conference isn’t available, so speakers are listed in alphabetical rather than chronological order.
Michael R. Ash & Kevin L. Barney
LDS Apologetics 101
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Bio
Michael R. Ash is a veteran staff member of the FAIR, former weekly columnist for the Mormon Times, and current columnist for Meridian Magazine. He has presented at six of the past fourteen FAIR Conferences and has written more than 200 articles defending the faith. He has been published in the FARMS Review, Sunstone, Dialogue, and the Ensign, and appears in the FAIR DVDs on the Book of Abraham as well as one addressing DNA and the Book of Mormon. Michael is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony In the Face of Criticism and Doubt and his second book, Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith. Michael and his wife Christine live in Ogden and are the parents of three daughters and the grandparents of six.
Kevin L. Barney was born in Logan, Utah, in 1958. He grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, prior to serving a mission to Colorado from 1977-1979. Upon his return from his mission he resumed his studies at BYU, where among other things he studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Coptic.
From 1982 to 1985 Kevin attended law school at the University of Illinois, after which he moved to Chicago, where he practices public finance law (currently with Kutak Rock LLP). In 1990, Kevin also earned a Master of Laws degree from DePaul University.
Kevin has published a couple of dozen articles, mostly relating to ancient scripture, in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, The Ensign, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Sunstone, FARMS Review, and BYU Studies, as well as a forthcoming publication in the Journal of Mormon History. He also edited the two-volume work Footnotes to the New Testament for Latter-day Saints.
He serves on the boards of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR), and also blogs at bycommonconsent.com.
Kevin is married to the former Sandy Lothson and has two children, Emily and Grant.
Roger Ekins
Defending Zion (PDF)
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Bio
Roger Ekins, a fifth-generation member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. After serving a mission in Argentina and a four-year hitch in the U. S. Army Reserves, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Utah in 1970 with an Honors Baccalaureate of Arts in English and in 1972 with a Master’s in Creative Writing. In 1976 he earned his Ph.D. in Higher Education from the Union Graduate School (Union Institute and University). Dr. Ekins has served in a series of administrative and teaching positions. These include Director of the Open Community Learning Center and Assistant Professor of English at Staten Island Community College, City University of New York; Dean of Student life and Faculty Fellow in English and Education at Johnston College, University of Redlands; Dean of Student Development and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Maine at Augusta; and Dean of Instruction at Butte College in Oroville, California, where he is currently chair of the Honors Program and teaches literature, writing and the history of ideas. Ecclesiastical responsibilities in the Church have included callings as bishop, gospel doctrine teacher and stake seminary supervisor. He is currently serving as a member of the Chico California Stake high council.
A President Emeritus of the California Humanities Association, which awarded him the Charles D. Perlee Award, Ekins serves on the National Honors Advisory Committee of the University of Utah and on the editorial board of his local newspaper, the Paradise Post. His previous publications include poetry, fiction, and essays. Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon and the California Mormon Newspaper Wars of 1856- 1857 marks his first book-length venture as well as his first publication in Mormon Studies, long a topic of deep interest. He lives and fly-fishes in Paradise, California, with his wife, the former Helen Kaye Leonard, also a graduate of the University of Utah. (She will be assisting him in his presentation.) They are the parents of three children: Sarah, Adam, and Rachael.
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Craig L. Foster earned a MA and MLIS at Brigham Young University. He is also an accredited genealogist and works as a research consultant at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. He has published articles about different aspects of Mormon history. He is the author of two books, co-author of another and co-editor of a three volume series discussing the history and theology of plural marriage. Foster is also on the editorial board of the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal.
Brant A. Gardner
Monotheism, Messiah, and Mormon’s Book
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Bio
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.
Roger Keller
The Grace of Apologetics
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Bio
Roger Keller is the former holder of the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University and teaches comparative world religions. He is a convert to the church, having served as both a Presbyterian and a Methodist Minister. His writing has been in areas of interfaith dialogue and the Book of Mormon.
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Armand L. Mauss received a bachelor’s degree in history and Asian studies from Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and both a master’s degree in history and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Mauss retired in 1999 as Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Religious Studies at Washington State University. Since 2005, he has taught courses in Mormon Studies as adjunct faculty in the School of Religion of the Claremont Graduate University. During his career, he has also been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Calgary; and the University of Lethbridge; and Visiting College Fellow in Religious Studies at Durham University in the UK.
He is author, co-author, or editor of several books, including Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church, with Lester E. Bush (Signature Books, 1984); The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (University of Illinois Press, 1994); and All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003), the latter two of which were awarded best book prizes by the Mormon History Association. He is also author of a hundred or so articles and reviews in professional sociological journals and in the journals of LDS scholarship, including Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; the Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies(reviews), and Sunstone Magazine.
His distinctions in academia during his career more generally include editorship of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the main national journal in the social-science study of religion; election to the governing councils of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion; and presidential candidate for those same societies. His distinctions in the realm of Mormon studies include twenty years on various advisory boards for Dialogue and then on the Dialogue Board of Directors,1999-2008 (four of them as chairman); selection as Redd Center lecturer at BYU (November 1982); two prizes for best articles in social literature from Dialogue (1972 and 1996); and, from the Mormon History Association, two best book awards (best first book in 1994 and best book in 2003), as well as MHA’s 1994 Grace Fort Arrington Award for historical excellence.
In his formal Church callings, Dr. Mauss served a mission to the New England States, 1947-1949, and since then he has served as a branch president and district president (overseas), a bishop’s counselor, a high priest group leader, a Gospel Doctrine teacher, and, more recently as a member of his stake’s Public Affairs Council. In less formal and more ancillary capacities, he has served the Church as a professional consultant to the Presiding Bishop’s Office (1964-1968) and to the Research Information Division (periodically during the 1970s and 1980s). Since 2005, he has also been active on the LDS Council for Mormon Studies at the School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University. He has been married to the former Ruth E. Hathaway for 59 years. They are the parents of eight children, 21 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
D. Jeffrey Meldrum
The Children of Lehi: DNA and the Book of Mormon
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Bio
D. Jeffrey Meldrum is a Full Professor of Anatomy & Anthropology at Idaho State University (since 1993). He teaches human anatomy in the graduate health professions programs. His research encompasses questions of vertebrate evolutionary morphology generally, primate locomotor adaptations more particularly, and especially the emergence of modern human bipedalism. His co-edited volume, From Biped to Strider: the Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transport, proposes a more recent innovation of modern striding gait than previously assumed. His interest in the footprints attributed to sasquatch was piqued when he examined a set of 15-inch tracks in Washington, in 1996. Now his lab houses well over 300 footprint casts attributed to this mystery primate. He conducts collaborative laboratory and field research throughout North America, and the world (e.g. China, and Russia), and has spoken about his findings in numerous popular and professional publications, interviews, television and radio appearances, public and professional presentations.
Daniel C. Peterson
Random Reflections on the Passing Scene
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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.
Michael D. Rhodes
The Book of Abraham: Dealing with the Critics (PDF)
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Bio
Michael D. Rhodes (born 1946) is a professor emeritus of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. Rhodes is an Egyptologist who has published a translation of some of the extant Joseph Smith papyri.
Rhodes received a BA in Classical Greek from BYU in 1970. He also received a BS in electrical engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1982 and an MS in physics from the University of New Mexico in 1989. He has also studied Egyptology at John Hopkins University, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Oxford, as well as archaeology at the University of Utah.
Rhodes has published many articles related to the Book of Abraham through the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), including some in books edited by John Gee.
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Matthew P. Roper was a research associate for the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, a part of the Maxwell Institute when this was written.
He received a BA in history and an MA in sociology from Brigham Young University.
Matt has had a long and abiding interest in the Book of Mormon and has published on issues such as warfare, Lehite social structure, interpretations of Book of Mormon geography, and other topics relating to the ancient pre-Columbian setting for the book. He also compiled and is responsible for the Harold B. Lee Library’s electronic collection of nineteenth-century publications about the Book of Mormon (1829–1844). His current research and publication efforts focus on questions of Book of Mormon authorship, historical and contemporary interpretations, and the intellectual history of Latter-day Saint scripture.
He and his wife, Julie, live in Provo, Utah, and have five children.
Gene A. Sessions
Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
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Bio
Gene A. Sessions was born in Ogden, Utah, and received his Ph.D. degree from Florida State University in 1974. He is the author and editor of numerous works, including Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant (1982, 2008), Latter-day Patriots: Nine Mormon Families and Their Revolutionary War Heritage (1975), Prophesying upon the Bones: J. Reuben Clark and the Foreign Debt Crisis, 1933-39 (1992),Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (with Donald R. Moorman, 1992), The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism (with Craig J. Oberg, 1993), Utah International: A Biography of a Business (with Sterling D. Sessions, 2002), and Mormon Democrat: The Religious and Political Memoirs of James Henry Moyle (1975, 1998), for which he received the Mormon History Association’s annual award for best edited work. Professor Sessions is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden. He has also been a consultant on documentaries and committees exploring the Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre and is past president of the Mountain Meadows Association. He and his wife Shantal have four children and seven grandsons.
Trent Dee Stephens
Evolution and Latter-day Saint Theology: The Tree of Life and DNA
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Trent Dee Stephens, Ph.D., is Professor of Anatomy and Embryology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University and Clinical Professor in the Department of Oral Biology at the Creighton University School of Dentistry. He received a B.S. in microbiology and a B.S. in zoology from Brigham Young University in 1973, an M.S. in zoology from BYU in 1974, and a Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He taught anatomy for four years in the medical and dental schools at the University of Washington (post-doc) and has been teaching anatomy and embryology in the dental program, dental hygiene program, and physician assistant program at Idaho State University since 1981. He was selected as the ISU Distinguished Teacher and as the Sigma Xi Jerome Bigalow Award recipient (for combining teaching and research) in 1992, and as an Outstanding Researcher in 2000. He was made an Honorary Member of the Golden Key International Honor Society in 2003, received the Lewison Award for Excellence in Teaching from the dental class of 2004, and was selected as the Outstanding Educator of the Year by the physician assistant class of 2004.
John A. Tvedtnes
The Charge of “Racism” in the Book of Mormon
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John A. Tvedtnes addresses modern criticisms that label the Book of Mormon as racist because of its descriptions of the Lamanites.
Drawing on anthropology, scripture, and ancient parallels, he explains that references to a “skin of blackness” symbolize divine separation rather than racial inferiority.
The “curse” and the “mark,” he argues, are distinct: the curse represents loss of God’s presence, while the mark served to preserve cultural and spiritual boundaries.
Tvedtnes highlights that Nephi, Jacob, and later prophets condemned prejudice, taught that God accepts “black and white” alike, and affirmed that righteousness—not lineage—determines divine favor. Joseph Smith’s inspired revision from “white and delightsome” to “pure and delightsome” further clarifies the spiritual meaning of purity. Comparing the Nephite–Lamanite tensions to other ancient ethnocentrisms, Tvedtnes concludes that the Book of Mormon’s message is profoundly inclusive: through repentance and faith in Christ, all peoples can overcome division and become one “delightsome” people before God.
Bio
John A. Tvedtnes was a senior resident scholar with the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, where he worked full-time beginning in 1995 after many years of teaching and research in the U.S. and Israel. He earned degrees in anthropology, linguistics, and Middle East studies (Hebrew) at the University of Utah, and pursued additional graduate work in Egyptian and Semitic languages at the University of California, Berkeley, and at universities in Israel.
He taught biblical Hebrew, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and Middle Eastern history at the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, and the BYU Jerusalem Center, where he lived and worked from 1971 to 1979. He also lectured internationally, including at the University of Haifa, Brandeis University, and for professional associations such as the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Schools of Oriental Research, and the World Union of Jewish Studies.
The author of ten books and more than 300 articles, Tvedtnes published with institutions such as the Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. His wide-ranging scholarship bridged linguistics, archaeology, and scripture studies, with particular emphasis on the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and ancient Near Eastern texts.
Margaret Blair Young
Black Latter-day Saints: A Faith-FULL History
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Margaret Blair Young is a writer-turned-filmmaker who hopes to return to writing very soon, and uses blogs the way pianists use scales: warm ups. She teaches creative writing at BYU. Margaret’s interests include Mormonism among African Americans, and the Cakchiquel peoples.
Speakers
Michael Ash, Kevin Barney, Roger Ekins, Craig L. Foster, Brant Gardner, Roger Keller, Armand L. Mauss, D. Jeffrey Meldrum, Daniel Peterson, Michael Rhodes, Matthew Roper, Gene Sessions, Trent Stephens, John Tvedtnes, Margaret Blair Young
Topics
LDS Apologetics 101, Defending Zion, Old Themes and Stereotypes Never Die: The Unchanging Ways of Anti-Mormons, Monotheism, Messiah, and Mormon’s Book, The Grace of Apologetics, The LDS Church and the Race Issue: A Study in Misplaced Apologetics, The Children of Lehi: DNA and the Book of Mormon, Random Reflections on the Passing Scene, The Book of Abraham: Dealing with the Critics, Nephi’s Neighbors: Book of Mormon Peoples and Pre-Columbian Populations, Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Evolution and Latter-day Saint Theology: The Tree of Life and DNA, The Charge of “Racism” in the Book of Mormon, Black Latter-day Saints: A Faith-FULL History
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 2003, the John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award recipient was Sharon Bunch.