We’re doomed!

Elder Kevin W. Pearson of the Seventy gave an important and very welcome speech to the 2018 FairMormon conference.  Here’s an article about his remarks from the official news site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

“Elder Pearson Says Independent Voices Are Needed to Sustain Faith: Mormon leader calls on members to engage on social media”

If you would like to actually listen to Elder Pearson’s speech, here it is:

https://www.facebook.com/fairmormon/videos/2107767335901306/

And be sure to listen to the question-and-answer portion, where he specifically mentions not only FairMormon but Book of Mormon Central and the Interpreter Foundation.

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Unfortunately — and for the very first time in the two decades that it’s been convening — I missed a substantial portion of the 2018 FairMormon conference.  I missed all of the Wednesday sessions, for instance.  Not, mind you, because they were devoted to discussing Mormon women and, thus, offensive to my blackly misogynistic heart, but, rather, because I was engaged that day in filming an interview in Fairfax, Virginia, for the film on the Witnesses that the Interpreter Foundation has undertaken and then in flying home with the film crew from Reagan National Airport.

And I missed several sessions on Thursday, as well, because I had various appointments that summoned me elsewhere.  I’ve been traveling so much that I really needed to take care of them while briefly alighting in Utah.  I even missed too much on Friday.

I did, however, catch some interesting presentations.  I think, for example, that Wade Miller’s work on evidence for the presence of horses in historic Pre-Columbian America is potentially extremely significant.

I was pleased to be able to participate in the bestowal on my friend Louis Midgley of an award for a lifetime of contributions to the defense of the faith.  It’s richly deserved.  (And he was caught completely by surprise, which made it especially fun.)

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I’ve been getting a kick out of the earnest discussions among a handful of pseudonymous critics on a small, extraordinarily nasty, absurdly uninformed, and mostly atheist ex-Mormon message board that — for reasons that a particularly insightful shrink might be able to discern — I enjoy watching.

They’re pretending to lament what they claim are the Interpreter Foundation’s recent financial difficulties — difficulties that I hadn’t noticed, but which they attribute to my ineptitude and to my appalling financial mismanagement (which would, I suppose, account for my failure to notice them!), as well as to my embarrassing inability to generate funding and to plunging public interest in what we’re doing — and they’re predicting the Foundation’s imminent demise.  Apparently, I’m busily searching right now for a scapegoat on whom to blame the debacle.

This inescapably reminds me of the confident prophecy issued more than five and a half years ago by another pseudonymous critic on that same message board:

“By Jan. 1, 2014 Interpreter will be dead. . . .  Either totally dead or down to token ‘blog’ style postings.” (Bond James Bond, 25 January 2013)

His prediction appears to have been mistaken.  But I think that sharing these predictions might be an amusing way to greet the guests at our seventh birthday party, which will be held almost precisely a year from now.

Incidentally, feel free to make a donation, even a small one, to the Interpreter Foundation.  We’re not even remotely desperate or in crisis, but we do function on the basis of volunteer labor and financial donations, and we’re trying to increase both so that we can expand what we do.

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This is an interesting article that you might enjoy:

“How Mormonism can save America”