Gina and movie reviewer Derrick Clements discuss Love, Simon.

"Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for online. Resolving both issues proves hilarious, terrifying and life-changing."

Dr Michael Ferguson is a research fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School.  He works at the intersections of culture and brain.   His active research includes cognitive neuroscientific investigations of intelligence, memory, depression, religiosity, depression and spiritual experience.

Michael joins Gina to discuss the relationship between religion, church, spirituality and God.   They go deeply into the question of where and how we feel the spirit, and how the spirit is ultimately an embodied experience.  

The Old Testament can be a bit confusing.   Biblical scholar Prof. David Bokovoy, joins Gina Colvin to discuss the things that are handy to know in order to really appreciate the Old Testament as a sacred text worth considering today.

Historian Newell Bringhurst discusses the background to his seminal work, "Saints, Slave and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism."

Originally published in 1980, Newell's important contribution to racial politics in the LDS Church is being republished by Greg Kofford books in light of the 40th year anniversary of Official Declaration Two, which extended the priesthood to 'all worthy men.'

Newell joins a chorus of scholars who argue that the Priesthood denial was less about Blackness than it was about White supremacy and as such isn't really worthy of the celebrations that the church intends in the coming months.  

"There's no point at which we can say, 'I've got it.'   Always and forever, mystery gets you.  Our searching for God is a search for symbols, analogies and metaphors.  All theological language is an approximation, offered tentatively in holy awe.  That's the best human language can achieve.

We must absolutely must, maintain a fundamental humility before the great mystery.  If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations, and never God."

So says Fr. Richard Rohr, and thus contemplates art historian and medievalist Professor Nancy Ross.  Nancy reflects on the place of art in religion in the West and how that has shaped her own spiritual development. 

General Conference is often scheduled at the same time as Holy Week.  While there is much in LDS History to suggest that the formal organisation of the church occurred not coincidently with Holy Week of 1830, we are according to Bob Rees, still missing out on the most important season of the Christian year.

In this discussion, Bob and I share our passion for Holy Week and talk about how we would love to see it taken up in LDS liturgical and contemplative practice.