Description

A perennially popular session, Why We Stay brings together people who have chosen to stay engaged withe the LDS Church despite challenges. But this isn’t testimony meeting. It’s stories of struggle, imagination, and bravery as the panelists bring their whole selves into risky, robust encounters with their church and their faith.

Trace Rogers was serving as an elders quorum president 20 years ago when within 2 days of study went from fully believing to an atheist. He has navigated back to a semi-belief in God and a heavily nuanced belief in the church. Trace has four amazing children and continues to attend church and actively participates with his beautiful wife of 32 years. He works hard to love and support everyone within his influence. Trace strives to see everyone, including leaders, as imperfect humans, striving for good, who regularly make mistakes, sometimes to dire consequence.

Michael Austin is the Provost and Academic Vice President at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah. When not fighting low-stakes academic battles of great intensity, he studies and writes about Mormon literature. He is the author of Rereading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem, Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist, and Testimony of Two Nations: How the Book of Mormon Reads and Rereads the Bible. He is the recipient of five Association for Mormon Letters Awards, including the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award. He is currently working on a history of Mormon literature tentatively titled The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land.

John Hamer is a American-Canadian historian, mapmaker, and Community of Christ minister. He holds degrees from BYU and the University of Michigan and has served as the Executive Director and later President of the John Whitmer Historical Association, the Religious Studies Coordinator and a current board member of Sunstone, and as a minister for the Centre Place congregation of Community of Christ in Toronto. He is a leading expert on various divergent groups of the Restoration movement.