Today, we’re excited to bring you a special episode—a replay of one of our favorite sessions from last year’s Restore Gathering, featuring Dave Butler.
We’re also thrilled to let you know that Restore 2025 is happening this September 25–27 in Orem, Utah, and this episode is a great preview of the kind of experience you can expect—thoughtful, joyful, expansive, and rooted in a deep desire to love and understand more fully.
In this session, Dave explores the idea of Holy Envy—a concept that invites us to not just tolerate other faiths, but to find deep beauty and truth in them. He shares beautiful personal stories and wrestles with how to honor the uniqueness of our own tradition while also recognizing the divine fingerprints in others.
He ultimately offers a powerful vision of restoration—not as something narrow or exclusive, but as a healing and gathering work that makes room for the whole human family.
This session made us laugh, think, and feel more committed to becoming people who love well, across all kinds of differences. We hope it does the same for you—and that it gives you a taste of what’s coming at Restore this year. You can find all the details and registration info at faithmatters.org.

Today we’re so excited to share a conversation about the new book Carry On, a rich and thoughtful history of the church’s Young Women organization. This project has been ten years in the making, created by historians Lisa Olsen Tait, James Goldberg, Amber C. Taylor, and the late Kate Holbrook. Joining us today to talk about the project are Lisa and James.

In this conversation, they trace the arc of the organization’s beginnings and evolution—from a small association founded among Brigham Young’s teenage daughters in the Lion House, through decades of change that continually adapted to meet the evolving spiritual and cultural needs of young women of the church

Over the years, sixteen general presidents—along with their counselors, boards, and local leaders—used their gifts to create programs that nourished the young women in their care. These programs taught not just spiritual values, but also public speaking, leadership, drama, music, recreation, and practical life skills. For many, the organization became a gateway to confidence, connection, and a sense of divine purpose.

Lisa and James also address some of the more difficult parts of our past, including the ways young women have often carried the weight of the community’s fears—especially around modesty and worthiness and the way this sometimes played out in the Young Women Organization. They reflect on the effects of the Correlation movement and the changes that came as the organization was placed more directly under a priesthood line of authority. But through it all, they highlight how young women and their Young Women leaders have responded with courage, creativity, and spiritual initiative.

We hope this conversation serves as an invitation to reflect on what we might want to reclaim or reimagine for this global and spiritually hungry generation today—and to ask, with real intention, how each of us, in the spirit of the legacy of this organization’s, use our own gifts, to carry on what matters most. We’re so grateful to James and Lisa for offering their insight, scholarship, and heart to this important story.

Today, we’re sharing a really special session from last year’s Faith Matters gathering, Restore.

This conversation has really stayed with us, and we're so grateful we get to share it with you now. It begins with a short, beautiful film—we’d highly recommend heading to our YouTube channel if you’d like to watch it. You’ll hear John Gustav-Wrathall share his journey as a gay Latter-day Saint—a path shaped by deep spiritual seeking, a loving and enduring partnership with his husband Goran, and an eventual return to his ward family. John speaks with honesty and courage about learning to trust the quiet, steady voice of the Spirit in the midst of complexity. His story holds both deep pain and profound peace.

After John’s story, Allison Dayton joins him on stage for a powerful conversation. As a mother of a gay son, she brings deep empathy to this space. She is the founder of Lift+Love and helped create Gather—a Christ-centered conference for LGBTQ individuals and those who love them. You can find more details at liftandlove.org, along with John’s full story.

This session was a beautiful reminder of what it can look like to wrestle with faith and walk the path of love.

We’d love to invite you to join us for conversations like this in person at Restore, this year, which will be September 25–27 at UVU in Orem, Utah. It’s going to be an unforgettable weekend with incredible speakers including Sharon McMahon and Arthur Brooks, along with outstanding music, art, and community, all centered on restoring faith, belonging, and wholeness. Early bird pricing ends soon—now’s a great time to register. You can go to faithmatters.org for tickets.

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Use GATHERFAITH coupon code for 20% off Gather tickets: https://www.liftandlove.org/