Bestselling Author Patrick Mason Shares the True Miracle of Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt

Patrick Mason has spent his career inside the hardest questions of Latter-day Saint history, the ones that shake other people's faith. He holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, and he wrote the book many bishops, stake presidents, and parents now hand to members walking through doubt. But this episode is not really about his scholarship. It is about a woman at a fireside who looked him in the eyes and asked where she could go to read more, and about the years afterward when his own wife, a convert with none of his cultural baggage, kept teaching him what the gospel of Jesus Christ actually is.

In this episode of Why We Believe, Patrick shares the prayer in the MTC that became the foundation of his testimony of Jesus Christ, the fireside moment that moved him to write Planted, and what teaching devout Muslim students in Cairo and worshipping with four elderly sisters in a tiny Romanian branch taught him about the gospel and the culture that surrounds it. He talks about the mission companionship he almost let unravel, the lesson in burying weapons of war, and why he believes the Church and the family are the two schools God gives us to learn how to love. Patrick's witness is simple. Faith is a gift from God, and he has spent his life trying to honor it.

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