FairMormon, Day One, Part Four

Provo's second temple, older than the first. — The new/old Provo City Center Temple is just an easy walk away from the Utah Valley Convention Center, where we’re meeting right now. This is a view of the temple — the aboveground portion, anyway; much is underground — from the south. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Scott Petersen, executive director of the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology in BYU’s Marriott School of Management, took his audience through certain early Christian writings on issues such as the Trinity, human deification, and baptism for the dead that are of particular interest to Latter-day Saints. His remarks were titled “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today and Forever: A Restoration of Primitive Christianity.”

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Scott Gordon, the long-time president of FairMormon, spoke on the ever-popular question of “Mormon Temples and Freemasonry.” It was going very well, and probably continued to go very well, but I took a call and had to go take care of a matter of family business that, it turns out, had a deadline hanging over it. So I missed the rest of what seemed a very lucid presentation.

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But I was back in time for a meeting on an important issue, and for the dinner that FairMormon puts on every year for conference speakers, officers, and volunteers.

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England's first temple — The London England Temple. (LDS Media Library)

By way of atoning for my failure to hear all of Scott’s talk and my consequent failure to report on it, here’s a list of FairMormon videos on the temple that was called to my attention the other day by the indefatigable Robert Boylan, who, he says, has been off at the London England Temple for the past two or three days:

https://www.youtube.com/user/fairldsorg/search?query=temple

There’s a whole lot of really good stuff in these videos.

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Very arguably the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century — and certainly one of my absolute favorite writers — was the inimitable C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), who (in a slightly weird coincidence) died on the same day as Aldous Huxley and the very day on which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Here’s something that he said about the necessity of apologetics:

“To be ignorant and simple now—not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground—would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” (C. S. Lewis)