Faith and Knowledge 2015

A conference was founded in 2007 for LDS graduate students in religion and related programs (i.e., philosophy, women’s studies, history, folk lore, literature, etc.) to think carefully about the relationship between faith and knowledge. It has continued every two years since that time. If you happen to be an LDS graduate student in a related field, and have special insights, research, or experience on this topic, please submit a proposal. The deadline for the Fifth Biennial Faith and Knowledge Conference is November 7th, 2014, so you have approximately two and a half weeks.

While I have not spoken at any of the four preceding conferences, I have attended one, and know the strength and beauty of what it can be. It was the Second Biennial Faith and Knowledge Conference, hosted at Harvard in 2009. I moved to Boston a few months before to study library science, but wasn’t quite sure about either the East or my choice of study. I missed my undergraduate discipline of philosophy; I missed religion.

Listening to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Kathleen Flake, Claudia and Richard Bushman, Gwen Reynolds, Deidre Green, Sheila Taylor, and others, I found it again. I felt that good home feeling that I hadn’t felt in a long time, that I was so hungry for. It shifted the trajectory of my life by setting me on a course to apply for a PhD program in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University.

This is why I ask you to try. Submit. Add your voice. Especially, especially your woman’s voice. Mormon Studies, like most fields, needs more of them. Maybe like me, you will find your home place. Maybe like me, you will leave changed and inspired. Maybe like others, you will change and inspire.