FAIR held a conference in Provo on August 6th and 7th. Presentations included the following speakers/topics:
Ed Pinegar: How to help young Latter-day Saints deal with criticisms against the Church and the doubts they cause while remaining faithful.
Margaret Barker: The Mother in Heaven and Her Children.
Brittany Chapman: An Act of Religious Conviction: Mormon Women and Nineteenth-Century Polygamy.
Ron Dennis: Captain Dan Jones: Defender of the Faith in Wales.
Brant Gardner: History and Historicity in the Book of Mormon.
James D. Gordon III: Faith and Scholarship.
Mrs. Brian D. Hales: Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Toward a Better Understanding.
Cassandra Hedelius: A house of order, a house of God: Recycled challenges to the legitimacy of the church.
Michael R. Otterson: Correcting The Record.
Dan Peterson: The Reasonable Leap into Light: A Barebones Secular Argument for the Gospel.
Paul Reeve: From Not White Enough, to Too White: Rethinking the Mormon Racial Story.
Stephen Webb: Why Mormon Materialism Matters.
Lynne Wilson: Christ’s Emancipation of Women in the New Testament from their Cultural Background and Baggage.
These all sound like great presentations. But the LDS Church News only reported on two of the talks: Otterson’s talk (he is employed in the LDS Church Public Relations Department) and Hedelius, an attorney working for the government somewhere near Washington DC.
The LDS Church News article did not clearly identify what (or who) Hedelius was targeting. (See, Speaker identifies ‘spiritual threat’, August 16, 2015, p. 11.) That omission has been fixed by LDS Meridian Magazine which has now published her entire talk, with footnotes, here: “A House of Order; A House of God: Recycled Challenges to the legitimacy of the Church.” http://ldsmag.com/a-house-of-order-a-house-of-god-recycled-challenges-to-the-legitimacy-of-the-church/
Dan Peterson and Ed Pinegar are usually more noticed than an obscure speaker on her maiden voyage into FAIR.