It seemed like everyone who went up to the mike didn’t actually have a question, but just wanted to pontificate, droning on and on in an inarticulate way.

Well, the same could be said of Fast and Testimony meeting, in my ward. But the positive far outweighed the negative in the sessions I attended, and I’m very glad I went. A couple of the sessions left me feeling much better about my own position in the church and reminded me of why I stay, despite the irritations– particularly the “Pillars of my Faith” on Saturday night. The session on couples who have different levels of belief/activity in the church was also very well-done without any complaining that I noticed. I’m in that situation myself, and it was very comforting to me to hear from others in similar situations, even if there wasn’t particularly any resolution to their situations.

I was recently speaking with a non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, who is well published and active in accademic circles. I asked her if she ever attended SunStone and her response was basically that there was too much angst and whining for her tastes. I’m not sure how you temper that, but it is a bit of a problem, I think.

Here’s what I did on Saturday:

- A very nice and positive presentation by Jennifer Jones on human sexuality.

- Carol Lynn Pearson’s Goodbye, I Love You Twenty Years Later. (Her daughter Emily, who has been in the news recently over her own experience being married to a gay husband [Steven Fales, who was also at Sunstone, but I didn't attend his session], was there and made a comment or two. She was sitting with a guy who was quite good looking and hunky, so you don’t need to cry for her anymore.)

- Mormon Cinema at Six: A Progress Report. This was an excellent panel on Mormon films, including the omnipresent Richard Dutcher, and a fine new addition to the fraternity, a recent convert named Kevin Foxe (producer of the Blair Witch Project). In another session they showed a clip from a movie he is working on, The Joseph Smith Interviews, which I thought was excellent.

Although the panel itself was good, I got so annoyed during the Q&A that I left early. It seemed like everyone who went up to the mike didn’t actually have a question, but just wanted to pontificate, droning on and on in an inarticulate way. There seems to be a lot of this “type” at Sunstone, and it was annoying the hell out of me at that particular moment.

- Over the lunch break there was a fuller set by Bengt Washburn, doing a Mormon-themed stand-up routine. He was very funny.

- I attended the session on Mormon urban legends by Bob Rees, with a response by Allen Roberts. Bob focused on those arising after 9/11.

- Then I went to a great presentation on Hitchcock’s Mormon Plot. It focused on the presenter’s journey to try to figure out why Hitch inserted several passages from the BoM in a funeral scene in his last movie, Family Plot. He had done his homework in film archives and with Hitch historians, and while there was really no way to know for sure, the journey was very fun.

- The last thing I went to was a film screening of Peculiarities, by BYU playwrite Eric Samuelsen. There was mixed reaction from the audience, but I liked it. It was an interwoven collection of six stories, all centered around LDS phariseeisms regarding sex. For instance, one of the stories was entitled NCMO, for Non-Committal Make-Out. Another was entitle Tahoe. Most people didn’t understand this one, thinking it was about pregnancy or abortion. I saw right away that it was about a couple who had gone to Tahoe, gotten married, had sex, gotten divorced or annulled, and then were driving back to Utah when we see them in the film.

That was it, I didn’t attend the banquet that night.

I had a great time, saw some old friends and got to hang with others, enjoyed most of the sessions I attended, spent some time in the hotel pool, ate at the Spaghetti Factory in Trolley Square. It doesn’t get much better than that.