Description

A banquet exploring the artifacts of Espionage. Every institution keeps files. This one just happened to keep them on itself.

Join Lindsay Hansen Park and Bryan Buchanan for the Symposium’s closing banquet as they crack open a century of Latter-day Saint surveillance. Bishops running stakeouts, apostles running informants, and a church that has spent as much energy watching its own membership as it has preaching to the world. From garbage-can intelligence gathering in 1930s Salt Lake to hidden tape recorders in 1960s BYU classrooms, from FBI background checks on future prophets to a CIA analyst who found spy work “bland,” this is the artifact record nobody puts in a museum case, and the artifuture nobody saw coming: a faith tradition whose archives increasingly read like case files.

Come declassified. Leave implicated. Top Secret: You Have Been Cleared for Dessert

Bryan Buchanan is a writer, editor, historian, and rare Mormon books dealer at the renowned Benchmark Books. He is a particularly proud graduate of the University of Utah–his degree in Hebrew was intended to be used in CES but he quickly realized that he hated that. In his second life, he is the co-host of the Sunstone History Podcast with Lindsay Hansen Park. Bryan edited the essay volume Continuing Revelation: Essays on Doctrine (published by Signature Books) and has about a million other projects in the works.

Lindsay Hansen Park is the Executive Director of the Sunstone Education Foundation and creator of the acclaimed Year of Polygamy podcast. Lindsay has consulted on multiple high-profile media projects, including Under the Banner of Heaven and Daughters of the Cult. Her work centers marginalized voices and historical truth-telling, and her forthcoming biography of Juanita Brooks will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2026.