Amie and I flew to Salt Lake City to attend the Faith Matter’s Restore Conference.

Day 1 was really good. I was able to work as a half volunteer (meaning that I helped in the morning, but didn’t miss any of the actual conference). This allowed me to meet a lot of people (I am an extrovert), but also allowed me to save seats before anybody else could. Out of 4200 attendees, we literally had the best seats in the conference (although we still had to sit behind the actual speakers and their personal guests).

There were many great speakers, but my favorites were:

• Eboo Patel
  • He is a Muslim who founded Interfaith America, and he spoke about the importance of religious diversity in America.
• Joseph Grenny
  • He is a NYT best selling author, lecturer, and founder of the Otherside Academy in Utah and Colorado. He spoke about families and four principles to remember as parents and about taking the long view.
• Elizabeth Oldfield
  • She is a British author and host of the The Sacred podcast. She spoke about her conversion to Christianity and her ensuing faith journey.
• David Butler
  • He is an LDS institute teacher, author, and cohost of the Don’t Miss This podcast. He spoke about “Holy Envy” and what we can learn from other faith traditions.

We ended the day with a guided meditation session led by Thomas McConkie.

The most impressive part was that only two of my favorite speakers were LDS and one of those spoke mostly about what he loved about other religions.

Day 2 was also very good. My favorite speakers were:

• Thomas McConkie
  • He is an LDS Buddhist/mediation teacher and a current student at the Harvard Divinity School.
• Jared Halverson
  • He is an LDS religion professor and podcaster who spoke about navigating the seeming contradictions between loving God and loving your neighbor.
• Astrid Tuminez
  • She is and Catholic, Buddhist, Mormon Feminist and is the president of UVU.

I will undoubtedly do more in-depth posts on some of these topics (once the video presentation is available), but a recurring theme from the conference was that if we aren’t incorporating just a little bit of Buddhism into our faith traditions, we are probably missing out.

We did get to talk to many people, such as Terryl and Fiona Givens, Tom Christofferson, Thomas McConkie, Bethany Brady Spalding, McArthur Krishna, and of course Tim and Aubrey Chavez.