Several Worlds Without End bloggers will be presenting at the upcoming Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium, held at the University of Utah from July 30 to August 2, 2014. If you’re in the neighborhood, we’d love if you’d show your support by attending their sessions!
The most—uh, colorful?—of the presentations will undoubtedly be Michael Reed’s “Off-Label Uses for Consecrated Oil and Holy Water.” Mike will chronicle the use of consecrated oil and water for enemas by nineteenth-century Church leaders. I have to take some of the blame for Mike presenting on this topic. I’ve been daring him to do it since he first told me about it a couple years ago. 
On Friday at 2:00 PM, Cheryl L. Bruno will present “Sealing and Salvation in Early Mormonism: Perspectives on the Law of Adoption.” This is a long-time research interest for Cheryl, so the audience can expect a well-documented and well-polished presentation.
On Saturday at 8:30 AM two of our bloggers will present in concurrent sessions. Michael Reed will compare Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Book of Mormon plates to a set of lead plates discovered in Sacromonte, Granada, Spain. Mike has blogged on this topic at WWE in the past. The session will have a very distinguished respondent in the person of Richard Lyman Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. In the same time slot, Seth Payne will present a paper titled, “Apologetic Ethics: Defending the Faith without Losing Your Soul.” Seth has written and presented about apologetics many times before, including a couple times here at WWE.
Clair Barrus and I will present concurrently on Saturday at 3:45 PM. My session is titled “The Book of Mormon and the Myth of the Frontier”; Clair’s is “Chiastic Sexual Patterns of the Story of Sodom & Gomorrah, and the Question of Literal Interpretation.” Clair’s presentation is based on a series of posts he published here at WWE earlier this year.
There are lots of other great papers in this year’s conference program as well. Brian Whitney, who has guest posted here at WWE in the past, will present on the history of Church discipline. Other distinguished presenters include Will Bagley, the Comptons, the Toscanos, the Danzigs, Mike Marquardt, John Larsen, D. Michael Quinn, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Janice Allred… the list goes on and on. And we hope to see you there, too!