Background and Early Faith Experience

John Dehlin [00:00:15] Tell us your name.

Elbert Peck [00:00:17] Albert Eugene Peck. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:20] Tell us a bit about your childhood growing up and your early years in the church that led to your interest in Sunstone.

Elbert Peck [00:00:29] When I was born in Utah. But I spent my junior high and high school years in suburban Washington, D.C. which had a big influence on me particularly. It awakened me intellectually and socially, particularly in my government and civics classes, Thomas Jefferson and people like that. So I sort of became a child of enlightenment and believed in pursuing truth wherever it went. And I guess I was later influenced by the Vietnam War and Watergate, events like that. I went to byu, so I don't know how far you want me to go.

John Dehlin [00:01:13] Yeah, that's good. In your early years, let's say high school, early college, the faith or the testimony that you had, where was it rooted? Was it rooted in spiritual experience? Was it rooted in sort of intellectual conviction? Was it rooted in just the culture and the heritage that you brought with you, the early testimony that you remember having? How was it composed or structured?

Elbert Peck [00:01:41] I think primarily it was fundamentally social. I grew up in great wards with great mentors and scoutmasters, and I loved that community and I loved the people and. And I thought the church was true. Although I had, I guess, in my teenage years, a lot of cultivated spiritual experiences, like youth conferences and taking family group trips to church history sites in New York and places where we'd have little family group testimony meetings with about eight different families. And those were all formative. So by the time I ended my teenage years, I knew the church was true. And I think I had a better than average understanding of the doctrines.

Elbert Peck [00:02:24] I remember thinking at one point that I knew everything about the church, and it all made. It was logically consistent. I wouldn't say I was an intellectual then, but I was intellectually curious. When I hit byu, I liked thoughtful presentations. I sort of fell in love with Hugh Nibley, and I really liked the exploration of Mormon history and Mormon studies because it was just learning more about how God works among our people and celebrating that.

Elbert Peck [00:02:59] So by the time I went on my mission in the mid-70s, I discovered BYU studies and even subscribed to that while I was a missionary, which was like, I was the only person on my mission who really read that sort of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:03:14] Where did you serve?

Elbert Peck [00:03:15] California. Nevada.

John Dehlin [00:03:20] Just out of curiosity, which ward did you grow up in?

Elbert Peck [00:03:24] The D.C. area, the McLean Ward and then the Vienna ward.

John Dehlin [00:03:27] So, Virginia.

Elbert Peck [00:03:28] In Virginia, yes. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:03:31] So did you. How was your mission? What was your mission like?

Elbert Peck [00:03:36] I guess I actually had two missions because I had a Change of mission presidents and a change of mission boundaries halfway through my mission. That gave me two missions and two mission presidents, and it was a great experience. The first one was very strict and rule bound, and I bristled under that. But I fell in love with the work and the people, and it was a great ocean of spirituality for me. And the second part, the new mission president kind of liked me. I was on a fast track of leadership, and I fell in love with the missionaries and moving the work of the mission, and that was a great experience. I had no complaints about my mission.

John Dehlin [00:04:14] After your mission, did you return to byu?

Elbert Peck [00:04:15] Went back to byu, took a bunch of honors classes, and that kind of piqued me intellectually and ran into some friends who wanted to form a study group to study Mormon things, which interested me very much. And. And members of that group were Gary Bergera and Ron Prittis, Scott Dunn. And each time we met, people would have to make a presentation. We'd all rotate that. And Gary would read a paper that he was going to present at the Mormon History association, or Sunstone. We went as a group to my very first Sunstone meeting. And I was, wow, it was the second symposium ever held.

John Dehlin [00:05:02] What year was that or era? Late 70s, early 80s?

Elbert Peck [00:05:09] Yeah, yeah, exactly. First symposium was like 79, I think, so this may have been 1980. And I remember someone pointing across this was at the University of Utah, pointing across a plaza and saying, that's Peggy Fletcher. She's the person who organized it. Wow, she's a big person. Later, a lot of members of that little group I belonged to started an independent newspaper at BYU called the Student, excuse me, the 7th East Press. I was the first editor of that newspaper that was a sensation at byu. We dealt with lots of intellectual issues. Gary Bergera wrote a theology column for the newspaper. And I met a lot of BYU faculty and became more close to them than I ever did as a student.

John Dehlin [00:06:02] Who are some of these faculty at BYU that you met and you were close with that?

Elbert Peck [00:06:06] I got to know them. People like Arthur Bassett, even Don Norton, a very conservative person in the English department, where I first really met face to face. Hugh Nibley. Who else did I meet there? Once a week or whenever we came out with a paper. We meant to be weekly, but we never were.

Elbert Peck [00:06:25] I'd take a stack of them and go and deliver them to faculty's offices, and they all say, come in, come in and sit me down and talk to me. Jim Faulkner would do that in political science. Lou Midgley would do that.

Elbert Peck [00:06:39] A Lot of these were very conservative people, but they celebrated the idea of a vibrant intellectual forum on campus run by students. Who else got to know Maren Morrison and the student? She ran the student programs for the university.

Elbert Peck [00:06:58] Probably dozens of faculty in the German department got to know Alan Keel. Scott Abbott. I don't think Scott was there yet. I got to know him later. It's where I first met Gene England.

John Dehlin [00:07:14] Ted Lyon.

Elbert Peck [00:07:15] No, I didn't know Ted Lyon.

John Dehlin [00:07:17] Okay, so BYU professors were actually there was a number of them excited about the 7th East Press.

Elbert Peck [00:07:25] They were static about it, more so than the students were. I think the reverse was true with the paper that succeeded that Student Review. But here the faculty were just thrilled about it and encouraged us on in doing the 7th East Press.

John Dehlin [00:07:38] How many years did that go on while you were there?

Elbert Peck [00:07:39] The 7th East Press, I ran that for one full school year. And it was a traumatic thing. We lived an apartment building. In the front room was the Office of Student Review. So it was like 24 hours. And it was sort of burning me out. But in the process of doing that, Peggy Fletcher, who was always looking for help at Sunstone, came down and kind of invited us up and met us. And we ran an interview with her in the newspaper. And then she recruited me to come and work for her. So I left the 70s press and went and worked for Peggy. She was having a second publication by Sunstone called the Sunstone Review, which was a combination book review and news magazine.

Elbert Peck [00:08:19] Mormon News Magazine. She hired me to be the managing editor of it. So for another year I was managing editor of that under Peggy Fletcher. And we ran a symposium in the summer. I was involved in that and wrote my first editorial for the Sunstone magazine and was kind of tutored and mentored and became very good friends with Peggy in that process. So that's how I ended up in Sunstone. I left doing student review and moved back to Washington, where my family was still, and got a job there.

Elbert Peck [00:08:56] I'd come out in the summers for the symposium and I was listed in the masthead as a national correspondent. And once driving home from a symposium. This was like an 80. Yes, no, 84. J. Bibe and I were driving home from a symposium across the country, taking my brother's car home. And we were talking about how great the symposium was and how nice it would be to have to have one in Washington, D.C. so he was a columnist for Sunstone, and I worked for Peggy. And so we called her and she gave us permission to organize what was the first regional Sunstone symposium in Washington D.C.

Elbert Peck [00:09:35] that was really a great event. Three of us, Jay and I and a woman named Alison Bethke, met each week and came up with our dream team of who we want to speak and found out all the Mormon intellectuals in Washington and there were quite a few because Mary Bradford had run Dialogue from Washington. So she had quite a network that we hooked into as well as a lot of other people. And the three people we wanted to have were like Hugh Nibley and Jan Shipps and Leonard Darrington, three big names back in the early mid-80s. And they all came.

Elbert Peck [00:10:08] We had 600 people there and it was a wonderful event. I planned it the next year and by the time the one happened in the next year, I'd agreed to come to Sunstone as a full time editor.

Joining Sunstone and Its Struggles

John Dehlin [00:10:24] As a full time employee?

Elbert Peck [00:10:25] No, full time editor. Peggy had gotten married in the meantime and decided, well, her husband decided he didn't want to be Mrs. Sunstone. And so they were leaving Sunstone. And she called me throughout the fall of 1985 asking me to come and take over Sunstone from her. And I always told her no because I'd seen how running because she was publisher and editor and running the business side and the editorial side had just ground her down and burned her out. I'd seen her spend, you know, 18 hours there, 10 o' clock at night, calling people on the phone begging for money. And she just couldn't do it all. And I wasn't going to burn myself out like Peggy did.

John Dehlin [00:11:08] What was your job before joining Sunstone full time?

Elbert Peck [00:11:12] I had a job in Montgomery County, Maryland as a community planner for their city planning department.

John Dehlin [00:11:21] So what changed your mind about joining?

Elbert Peck [00:11:26] Well, since I said no, in the meantime they punted and hired Daniel Rector to be a halftime business manager for Sunstone. And since they didn't have anyone else really to turn to, they organized a group of four people to be head of the transition. Four people from the board of trustees, which included John Ashton, Kent Frogley J. Bonarici, and I can't remember who the fourth person was, maybe Mary Beth Raines. And so they had decided to basically turn Sunstone over to Daniel Rector.

John Dehlin [00:12:04] Tell us about Daniel.

Elbert Peck [00:12:05] Daniel was a great guy. Never seen a person with more self confidence than chutzpah really believed he could do almost anything. He had a strong interest in Mormon theology, but as a career he bounced around. He sold used cars, he sold this, he'd done this, he'd done this. And he sort of came to Sunstone just because he really needed a job. But he liked Sunstone.

John Dehlin [00:12:27] Wasn't he the son of someone prominent? Is that right?

Elbert Peck [00:12:30] Yes. His father was Hartman Rector Jr. A member of the 70 in the church. So his dad was a general authority, which helped Daniel and hurt Daniel sometimes. So Daniel agreed to do it. And a lot of people said, well, you need to get somebody, you need to get somebody, you need to get Elbert. And I was coming out for the Mormon History association, which was being held in Salt Lake. And the night before the mha, Peggy was having her farewell banquet, which I was also going to go to. And they were also going to announce the new head of Sunstone, which would be Daniel.

Elbert Peck [00:13:06] So while there for that week, Peggy, Daniel and Bono Richie lobbied me very hard to come and take over to be the editor of Sunstone. Peggy was publisher editor. Daniel would be the publisher, I would be the editor. And Bonner was a person who I always respected so much. He'd given a talk that Sunstone published that had a huge impact on me.

John Dehlin [00:13:31] Which talk was that?

Elbert Peck [00:13:32] It was the individual in the institutional church. It was a B.H. roberts Society lecture that Peggy published. So I pondered that whole thing. I prayed about it a lot. I remember once when I was walking around Temple Square whether or not I should take Sunstone or not, just diverging career paths.

Elbert Peck [00:13:55] I was sitting down on a planter and also in this pre recorded music of the Tabernacle Choir started singing. And there was this hymn. I can't remember the title of the hymn, but there's a line in it that says, within the kingdom of his might, all is good and all is right. Something like that. And it just hit me that if I do Sunstone and it's within the kingdom, it's an acceptable choice.

Elbert Peck [00:14:24] And then I felt this spiritual prompting that told me it's okay to take stones. It's not like God wanted me to take Stonestone. But it was an okay decision as long as I continued on a spiritual path. And so I decided, okay, I'd do it. And I went and told them I'd do that.

Elbert Peck [00:14:43] We weren't very clear on the delineation of duties. And I guess in pitching it to me, Daniel particularly had pitched that we'd be an equal team. He'd be publisher and I'd be editor. That caused a little friction later on because we hadn't clearly delineated that.

Elbert Peck [00:15:04] So I came to Sunstone and Sunstone was broke and beaten up and had no money. And supporters were all disillusioned because the last year of Peggy's tenure She'd had no money and had been so burned out, she'd come out with like two issues in a year.

John Dehlin [00:15:24] What were the subscription rates when you first joined? Do you remember, roughly? Was it 1,000? Was it 500? Was it.

Elbert Peck [00:15:32] No, it was probably. It may have been 4,000, maybe 3,000 something.

John Dehlin [00:15:41] In what ways? Was it a mess or struggling or sort of?

Elbert Peck [00:15:46] Well, we had. Donors were disillusioned, thinking the organization would fall apart. In the years of Peggy's last tenure, the board of trustees and people trying to save Sunstone were thinking of, like, bagging the magazine altogether and just having the symposium, which was paid for itself, money wise. And the magazine was a drag. And Peggy, this visionary, would plead and beg. She would not give up on the magazine. And so we inherited the magazine Symposium. And we liked both of those, but there was like zero money. Not only zero money.

Elbert Peck [00:16:17] We were hugely in debt. Peggy Daniel's first two years at Sunstone or three years, was basically paying off Peggy's debts. Every time we go to a printer to print something, they'd say, oh, yeah, they tell us this. After they accepted our printing job, they'd call us and say, we've discovered in our files that you guys owe us $5,000 for some old magazine which you never paid us for. You took the magazine and ran off on. And before we give you this current thing, well, you have to pay us for the old one. And Daniel was. I mean, that happened weekly. We were just paying huge sums.

Elbert Peck [00:16:55] And once after the symposium, we had a ton of money for us, maybe $10,000 in the bank. And some old debt person we owed from Arizona sequestered our funds and took them all from the bank. And we were broke after the symposium.

Elbert Peck [00:17:13] And on top of that, we owed maybe $60,000 to the IRS because Peggy, in trying to make ends meet, would choose to pay people's weekly payroll rather than paying the IRS what she owed for deducting their taxes from their payroll. So we had a demanding schedule that we had to meet to repay the IRS loan. And we had to get magazines out, had to be confident, and we had.

Elbert Peck [00:17:39] It was hard. And we lived in a terrible place. We worked in a terrible place and didn't have any money. And we were working for almost nothing.

John Dehlin [00:17:49] How did you keep your spirits up?

Elbert Peck [00:17:52] It was a cause. Those were some of the best times of my life. It was really fun. Daniel and I liked each other so much and worked so well. I talked to him about the issues I was debating on the magazine, and he cared so much about the magazine. We have a few quite great conversations, which really improved to have someone to talk to. And he was working with all the other issues. Fortunately, because of a previous job I had I Knew database, which our subscribers list was on. Daniel knew nothing about it. So I was able to work on our subscriber list. And Daniel would write fundraising letters and new subscription letters and run them by me. And we'd have. It was a great collaborative experiment and experience, and it was just great times with no money and the wolf always beating out the door.

Vision and Role of Sunstone in Mormon Culture

John Dehlin [00:18:38] So when you joined, did you have a hope or a vision or an aspiration? It doesn't need to contrast with what came before. Did you have a hope or an aspiration or vision that you wanted to carry forward, or did you have a new vision or hope or aspiration that you wanted to sort of, you know, have as being your imprint for your tenure?

Elbert Peck [00:18:58] Well, first of all, I just wanted to carry the torch very well because I'm in awe of Peggy Fletcher. She's one of my personal heroes, and she has this wonderful mind with great ideas, and she's always stretching further than she has ability and resources. And I had caught on to so many of those ideas and wanted to help see them realized. And Scott Kenny, I didn't know personally when I came, but I also held him in awe. So part of it was just carrying the tradition and.

Elbert Peck [00:19:25] But there were some things I wanted to do which were not that unusual from what people had done before. I had developed a great interest in biblical scholarship and wanted to introduce more Mormonism to that. Peggy and Scott had both had similar interests in that, and Daniel had an interest in that. So we instituted a scripture lecture series that met once a month and went along with the church's curriculum. And we brought in critical studies into scripture studies, Bible, Book of Mormon Doctrine and Covenants. And that was something both loved doing. And it was really fun.

Elbert Peck [00:20:00] And I like. I mean, people always think they're trying to reinvent this, but it's a continued problem. I wanted to bring in more what I guess gets classified as faithful voices to Sunstone than Peggy was able to do. And I was able to do that because I'd been at BYU so much, involved with 70s press and stuff. I knew a lot of these faculty members. So those first few years, we signed up tons, dozens and dozens of BYU faculty members for the symposium program and got them to write and speak for the magazine. Even Hugh Nibley, who was willing to do magazine and Sunstone sessions, who are

John Dehlin [00:20:42] some of the faithful voices that you could really rely upon or that you felt were an important balance to the. To the more liberal, left leaning aspects of Sunstone.

Elbert Peck [00:20:53] Yeah, well, that's a bad dichotomy, as you no doubt realize. Liberal faithful. Because Gene England is very liberal and he's very faithful. And at that time, Gene was participating more in Sunstone than he'd ever done before for his own quirky dynamics.

Elbert Peck [00:21:06] But, well, people like David Whitaker in the BYU archives who dealt with the Mormon collection, people like Jim Faulkner, people like Art Bassett in humanities, Jim Faulkner in philosophy, even Lou Midgley would participate, even people in the history department and some people from the Smith Institute, Jill Durer would participate.

Elbert Peck [00:21:36] You just go through a symposium program. There were a lot. And they'd write book reviews for us, they'd write articles, they'd speak at the symposium, they'd respond to sessions in the symposium. It was really fairly easy in those late 1980s to get BYU people involved, which was part of my vision. Daniel's vision was to have that we kind of wanted everyone who had an intellectual interest in Mormonism to be in the tent talking to each other and listening to each other. I sort of believe that that's a naive philosophy, but it certainly was my guiding philosophy on that.

Elbert Peck [00:22:10] In terms of other things I did at Sunstone in those early years, we revived a lot traditions that I liked that had been dropped by whatever reason over the years. Like in the early Sunstones, they would regularly publish plays, and they hadn't in the last half decade. And so we revived the publishing of plays and we published more poems than had been published in the past and found ways to frame them so that they. They used to dedicate a whole page to a poem in a magazine, which meant you couldn't print many poems because you couldn't dedicate many pages to a whole poem. But by creating space at the end of articles, we could do more poems.

Elbert Peck [00:22:55] Once Jean England criticized me for just using poems as filler. And that hurt because we were working very hard to create space to put poems in. So then we came up with the idea of putting icons on top of the poems and put. Putting more blank space around them to make it to frame the poem better so it wouldn't look like we were just using them as filler.

Elbert Peck [00:23:18] There are a bunch of other magazine things that we did, old traditions that we revived. I guess one of the things wasn't new to Sunstone but was really new to the magazine was cartoons. Sunstone under Peggy had published three cartoon books by Calvin Grondahl.

Elbert Peck [00:23:36] But he wasn't a regular feature in the magazine. And we recruited Pat Bagley and Calvin Grondahl to be to have Mormon cartoons in each issue. And then we put tons of other cartoons. That was a major contribution of ours.

John Dehlin [00:23:52] Are there any cartoons that stand out as your favorite or that you really. We could probably go back and interlay some of them over your description of them. That's putting you on the spot. But no.

Elbert Peck [00:24:01] Yeah, well, cartoons actually became one of our most controversial problems. But no, I just left a lot of Cal Grondel, so there's tons of them.

John Dehlin [00:24:13] So what role were you hoping Sunstone would play within Mormonism? What was your vision for its, you know, let's say that in a soup there's salt and there's carrots and there's beef or whatever and there are lots of ingredients. What was the role that Sunstone played in the ingredients to Mormon culture or the Mormon experience?

Elbert Peck [00:24:36] I came to articulate this more later, but it was inherent in my early approach. It was the idea of an open forum which was a place where people can come and speak truth as they understand it. Scholars and laity, people who have experiential truth to tell and people have academic research and non Mormons who are interested in Mormon studies or who can do reflections to bring them on us, that will help us. And in that discussion by people who of belief and people who do not believe, but honest civil discussion, it can produce some fruits that might be helpful to Mormonism.

Elbert Peck [00:25:13] But we really didn't have, and I didn't have a study in the Ark like the church needs this, although I believe the church needs something like that. It was primarily for the people who'd be interested in this. I always believed that the subset of Mormonism that would be interested in this should grow and grow and grow because the number of college educated Mormons each year were growing and growing. And even if we just took a few of those who had true intellectual curiosity, Sunstone should be on a growth track.

Elbert Peck [00:25:45] That sort of played out a little bit in the late 80s when we came, I came in 86 Daniel and I came and Daniel was rigorous in trying to get new subscribers and would send out these promotional letters and bring them in and it was bringing in money. And we were growing and growing at our peak about the time Daniel left or just a year before he left, I guess we had 10,000 subscribers and a lot of those came from.

Elbert Peck [00:26:26] We published this issue when Apostle Native American George P. Lee, now Apostle 70, quit the church and he wrote a handwritten Manifesto of why he was leaving and criticized the church. And because we also kind of have a news portion of the magazine, certainly I felt a need to sort of be a magazine of record for the important things that happened. We published George Lee's letters, which in my mind were really kind of crazy, but showed people what a crazy guy he was.

Elbert Peck [00:27:01] Well, it turns out tons of Mormons wanted to read those letters, very faithful Mormons, and they were willing to plunk down $30 for a subscription just to get the issue that had the George P. Lee letters. It was pre Internet days. They couldn't read them online.

Elbert Peck [00:27:18] We got several thousand subscribers just from that promotion. In fact, that may be the only issue of Sunstone that was reprinted. We printed it again to use it just as a promotional magazine so the

John Dehlin [00:27:30] newspapers wouldn't print them.

Elbert Peck [00:27:32] Well, they printed excerpts from them, but they didn't print the entire thing. So it was like a long, long thing. And that was very helpful and brought in tons of subscribers. A couple years later, the journalist Lynn Packer wrote his article about Paul Dunn and his fabricated stories.

Elbert Peck [00:27:59] Sunstone has an intimate history involved in that. I'd heard through rumors at BYU that Lynne Packer, because he used to be, he was once a journalist and professor at byu, that he had all this stuff on Boyd K. Packer, on Paul Dunn. And I asked him to come and present it at the symposium. And he sent us this paper which was just this angry diatribe full of facts, but he'd call him liar, liar, pants on fire in the paper and stuff. And Daniel and I didn't feel like we could just let him speak. That tone of attack about Paul Dunnett needed to be more dispassionate journalism.

Elbert Peck [00:28:38] So we didn't let him give the paper at the symposium. Lyn, being a good journalist, sold his research basically to the Arizona Republic. And they bought his research and his information and wrote their own story rather than going with his.

Elbert Peck [00:28:57] And when the. When the story broke, then we decided to be what Sunstone does best, perhaps rather than a breaking news journal, which we're not a reflective voice. So we took the Limb Packer article, which had more than the Arizona Republic series did, and we edited it down. And then we reprinted the Arizona Republic things. And then we invited a bunch of people to reflect on the.

Elbert Peck [00:29:28] On the Paul Dunn stories from many different angles. We had a person who's in the English department in Iowa, who's not a Mormon, who's dealt with how people tell stories and they're full of non truths, and we Had Mormon historians, Man in the street, and lots of different people reflect on it, which made the segment on Paul Dunn grew and grew and grew so much that it was very large. And so we put it on the COVID And then. And this was also in pre Internet days, there were all these jokes that were running around about Paul Dunn because of this. And people didn't have the Internet, but fax machines were very popular then.

Elbert Peck [00:30:08] And so they were like a Mormon samizdat where these cartoons were being faxed all around the church. So we thought we would document that part of this Mormon subculture of the Paul Dunn episode. And because the thing had taken so much space, I didn't want to dedicate a page or two more to the Paul Dunn things. And we had a lot of empty space at the end of all these little articles we had about Paul Dunn. So I spread the cartoons out, and in our introductory part of that, we said, these cartoons are here just to document what was happening at the time. And we're just reproducing them.

Elbert Peck [00:30:46] We didn't commission them. Well, no one reads the introductory thing. And Daniel printed a huge number of that Paul Dunn issue, thinking that it would be a great promotional issue the way the George P. Lee one had been.

Elbert Peck [00:31:03] And lots of people got upset, both about the volume of space of the magazine we dedicated to it, they thought. But they were just also mad about any discussion Paul Dunn. And then the cartoons made them think that we were attacking Paul Dunn. And that was our motives. And so people were mad at us for beating up on Paul Dunn. And I guess there was a big difference between being an excommunicated general authority who people didn't have such an emotional attachment to like they did with Paul Dunn. And if he's excommunicated.

Elbert Peck [00:31:35] George Lee. Yeah, George Lee. They didn't have the emotional attachment like they did with Paul Dunn, who'd been a very popular speaker for decades.

John Dehlin [00:31:42] This was fellowshipped or censured, but not.

Elbert Peck [00:31:44] Yeah, whatever. We don't know the actual discipline on him. But he wasn't excommunicated, at least publicly. And so Joyce Peeley is excommunicated. So you can find out the dirt about that scoundrel. But Paul Dunn's a little more questionable and you like him better anyhow.

Elbert Peck [00:32:00] And so people are mad at you, and he's not excommunicated. Had he been excommunicated, they may. And publicly. It's known that. Known that that was the case. They may have welcomed the issue, but they didn't. So we got people Canceling subscriptions over that.

Elbert Peck [00:32:17] And when Daniel sent out his promotional letter, which was like the same letter that he'd sent out with George P. Lee, except changing Paul Dunn for George P. Lee, we had a week where we couldn't do anything in the office except field phone calls from people who weren't subscribers but were just mad at us. And they were calling on a toll free 800 number, which was costing us money, and they just yelled at us. And there were like four or five of us in the office all the time, always taking phone calls for this whole week from. People were just furious at us for that issue.

John Dehlin [00:32:49] So you felt, I mean, there's a sense to where you could look at that as. It's like the buzzards or the vultures circling on the carcass, you know, I'm sure that wasn't your intent, but I'm sure it could have easily been viewed.

Elbert Peck [00:33:00] Well, and the people who were calling us were not subscribers. They were the average member whose names Daniel would acquire these mailing list names. He like, there was a very Mormon magazine called this People. And he'd trade and get their subscriber list and then he'd get the BYU studies list and then he'd get. He just got a lot. Every mainstream kind of Mormon list he could get. We would send promotional letters to inviting them to take Sunstone. So these were people who, many of them had never read a Sunstone before, but they read this promotional letter and they do think we're a buzzard taking advantage of him.

Elbert Peck [00:33:29] I'm actually proud of the content of that issue. I think the collection of essays are. Are reflective and sensitive and very good on the topic. Even some of our best supporters, though, however, thought it was too much. It was disproportionate for the issue.

Elbert Peck [00:33:49] Even after all the years and really thinking about those, I don't think that was the case. I think it was an important issue that really needed to be discussed. And Sunstone was the only place that it was discussed.

Elbert Peck [00:34:00] And that is one of the main jobs that Sunstone does. It allows for that kind of discussion on issues that are basically taboo. Newspapers report it when it happens and then move on. And where else is there a reflective forum? Certainly before the Internet, there was no other place but Sunstone. They did a good job, I think. Sam.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.