Informed Saints: A Roundtable Podcast Of Study And Faith

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Informed Saints, a roundtable podcast where our mission is to help build informed testimonies of the Gospel of Jesus Christ by tackling the latest news trending topics in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints through the lens of scholarship. My name is Jasmine Rapley. I'm a Latter Day Saint content creator, so I'm used to making a lot of short form social media content, but I'm really excited to now dive into more long form discussions. My co host is Steven Smoot, a PhD candidate at the Catholic University of America studying Semitic and Egyptian languages and literature. He's currently an adjunct professor at Brigham Young University in Ancient Scripture and he is a researcher at the Ancient America Foundation. My other co host is Neil Rapley who is also a researcher at the Ancient America foundation who is widely published in Book of Mormon stuff, church history stuff, and he is also my husband. [00:00:51] Speaker B: We hope to communicate that believing in the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ is miraculous, beautiful and true. And we know many other well respected scholars and other highly intelligent, well read people who feel the same. [00:01:03] Speaker C: Now I know what you're thinking, but Stephen, I don't have time to get into scholarship. I've got 12 hours of TikTok to scroll through and I've got to take my kids to swig to get their giant sodas. It's okay. We want to convey that you don't have to have a fancy degree, you don't have to be a giant nerd like me or a professor or something in order to study the gospel and church history and to make it meaningful and interesting, engaging. So what we want to do in this podcast is to share tools to enhance your study of the gospel and church history in a way that's meaningful, in a way that will make sense to you and that will be accessible to you. [00:01:34] Speaker B: So every week we'll be covering things like difficult topics that you might have come across on social media, church news, and just cool research that we've found or that we've been doing ourselves that we think you'll find interesting and could enhance and strengthen your testimony of the Gospel Jesus Christ. We'll try to keep it lighthearted. We'll be reacting to tweets and TikToks sometimes, but we're also going to bring on top experts in their field to talk about these various topics so that we can convey to you how learning deeply and studying and engaging seriously can actually strengthen your testimony. [00:02:08] Speaker A: I am really excited for what the future holds here, so we hope you'll join us every week, starting with this podcast, Informed Saints. You can listen to it on YouTube, social media, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.