This year's three-day conference for Mormon intellectuals at the Sheraton City Centre Hotel in Salt Lake City is also offering its own explorations of LDS founder Joseph Smith to coincide with the church's celebration of his 200th birthday.
But for the most part the hefty program reads like a list of recent postings on any number of Mormon blogs. These subjects have been discussed ad nauseam by countless writers across the country.
So the question is: After 26 years, has the Sunstone Symposium, an independent forum on Mormonism, become obsolete?
Clearly, Sunstone Magazine's editor Dan Wotherspoon doesn't think so.
An annual symposium offers a couple of benefits that blogging can't touch: face to face interactions and in-depth analysis, he says.
"We are providing a gathering place," Wotherspoon says, pointing out how often people posting on the same Web blog suggest meeting. "We hope it's not going to be a lost art in the future."
Seeing a person's facial expressions and hearing their tone provides understanding of complex topics. Or if the speaker is kidding. That is lost in an Internet format, where people can offer opinions, arguments and even allegations of wrongdoing without revealing their identities, if they choose.
And, while blogs can get a conversation going, speaking at a symposium requires preparation and a level of thinking that is often absent online.
"Nobody on a blog is going to spend hundreds of hours researching Noah's Ark the way [Brigham Young University biologist] Duane Jeffrey did last year," Wotherspoon says. "There's still a need for the big and important studies."
And Sunstone's open approach to LDS issues is not available in other gatherings which are avowedly "faith-promoting" or antagonistic to Mormonism, he says. "We try to strike a balance by allowing conversations that have no audience anywhere else."
Unfortunately, today there are not as many established Mormon intellectuals like the late professors Lowell Bennion and Eugene England to show college students how to balance faith and reason, Wotherspoon says.
Even though registration is free to students, Toby Pingree of Sunstone's board of trustees says that Sunstone is not attracting as many young people as organizers would want.
"We don't have another generation coming up that are terribly interested," says Pingree, who is stepping down as chairman at the symposium. "But for me and a small group of people I see, there's still a great need for an open forum where our religion can be discussed in ways it can't be in normal church channels."
Some of the perspectives on why people stay in the church may be repetitive, he says, "but it's rehash of Mormonism on a higher level than Sunday school."
University of Utah undergraduate Dallas Robbins is a blogger and avid Sunstoner. He has been subscribing to the magazine and attending symposia since becoming converted to the LDS Church in 1989. He even read Sunstone while on his LDS mission to Indiana from 1990 to 1992. He gave some articles to his mission president who loved them, Robbins says. "It was a cool experience."
He came home in July and one month later he was a volunteer at the symposium.
"What I really loved was seeing people whose books I had read give talks," Robbins said this week. "You only knew them in print. Here you could see them, ask them questions. That was really exciting to me."
Sunstone became for him a place where he could discuss things that were off limits at church, history, literature and scriptural studies, for example.
But a few years ago, Robbins became less involved with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that coincided with diminished interest in all things Mormon, including the Sunstone Symposium.
"Too much stuff about the same stuff from all the other times they talked about the stuff. I think the symposium has become the Sunday school class from heck: it's boring, boring, boring, because it's the same stuff I heard last time, over and over and over again," Robbins wrote last year on his blog, latterdayslant.com. "Now I know that is a general exaggeration, and is not true in every lecture/panel/etc. . . . but over all, I know it's a problem when I doze off to sleep more times at the symposium than I ever have at Sacrament meeting."
Since then, though, Robbins' activity in the church and Sunstone has re-emerged. He went last year and found many stimulating discussions. If some sessions are old news to him, he realizes that they may be aimed at those who are hearing it all for the first time.
"This year I'm just hoping it will be a good experience," Robbins said this week. "I am hoping that something will be reignited."
For information about Sunstone Symposium program, go to http://www.sunstoneonline.org.
pstack@sltrib.com
