As a proselytizing faith with a committed corps of volunteer missionaries, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is forever driven to boost its ranks and broaden its reach. It did so last year at a level not seen in decades.

Convert baptisms topped 308,000 in 2024, a 27-year high, and pushed total membership above 17.5 million. The army of missionaries shot past 74,000, a number not seen since 10 years ago after leaders lowered the age minimum for full-time service. And the tally of missions around the globe swelled to 450, more than at any point in the faith’s 195-year history.

Amid all these encouraging statistics for the church, discouraging trends persisted. Babies added to the rolls continued to fall and the loss of members continued to rise.

This week’s show aims to make sense of all these figures, including nations where the church is growing the fastest or shrinking the quickest, with the help of independent researcher Matt Martinich, who tracks such data for the websitescumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com.

When news broke last fall that redesigned temple garments — including a sleeveless version — were already on sale in some foreign countries, it became a hot topic among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Would the sacred underclothes, which are expected to be worn under daily clothing, be visible under tank tops? Would the new slip or half-slip allow women to wear their own underwear? Would they be accepted by other members or seen as caving to modern fashion?

Perhaps the biggest question was about modesty. For years, Latter-day Saint women had been taught that the typical garment, with its capped sleeves to cover shoulders and upper arms, was meant, at least in part, as a display of modesty. Some members even joked about “porn shoulders.”

What do the new “open sleeves” say about those previous ideas? How do the new styles fit in practice? And what other changes would members like to see?

Discussing those questions and more on this week’s show are Latter-day Saints Andrea Fausett, a Hawaii-based Instagram influencer who has reviewed and showcased the new garments, and Northern California-based Instagrammer Rachel Gerber, who runs the LDS Changemakers social media account.

In the mid-1970s, a tiny group of Latter-day Saint women in Boston launched a modest effort to discuss women’s issues — past and present — in a magazine they called Exponent II (named after the newspaper of their Mormon foremothers, Woman’s Exponent).

These modern feminists did not challenge the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on, say, polygamy, priesthood or other doctrines. They focused primarily on the challenges of motherhood, marriage and material culture.

Their first editor was Claudia Lauper Bushman, who exemplified Mormonism as wife of famed historian and Latter-day Saint Stake (regional) President Richard Bushman and as a mother of six. After she was asked to resign the editorship, she went on to other professional and personal projects.

Though the Exponent II group was hardly revolutionary, 50 years later it remains an important voice in the Latter-day Saint world, while Claudia Bushman went on to influence an entire generation of feminists in the church. Hundreds of men and women gathered recently to honor her life and work.

On this week’s show, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, one of Exponent II’s founders who would eventually teach history at Harvard and win a Pulitzer Prize for her work humanizing ordinary women, talks about the Claudia conference, the trajectory of Latter-day Saint feminism, and how today’s activists are different from the past.

As practicing Latter-day Saints with nuanced faith, Valerie and Nathan Hamaker wanted to help fellow believers grappling with a “faith crisis” or how they have been “wounded” by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So, in 2022, Valerie, a mental health counselor in Kansas City, Missouri, and Nathan launched a podcast, called “Latter Day Struggles,” to address some of their issues and find peace.

Their podcast drew wide appeal, but it also came to the attention of their local Latter-day Saint leaders. After numerous conversations, they say, those leaders summoned the couple to a disciplinary council. Expecting to be formally tossed out of the church, the couple instead chose to resign their membership.

Since news of their resignation became public, the Hamakers have heard from thousands of friends and supporters.

On this week’s show, the couple share their experience, their interactions in their congregation, their views of church discipline, their decision to leave, their efforts to help fellow Latter-day Saints, and whether they would consider rejoining the fold when their local leadership changes.

A new report by the Pew Research Center, the Religious Landscape Study, has given members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints plenty to pat themselves on the back about.

According to the survey of 37,000 U.S. adults, including 565 self-identified Latter-day Saints, active members of the Utah-based faith are some of Christianity’s workhorses, showing up for church each Sunday and finding time in between services to pray, read scriptures and teach their children about their faith — all at enviable rates.

At the same time, the study’s authors found a significant drop in U.S. retention rates since the last time they polled members in 2014. And women, long heralded as the more reliable sex, appear to now be in the minority.

On this week’s show, sociologists Marie Cornwall and Tim Heaton, former professors at church-owned Brigham Young University and editors of the 2001 book “Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives,” contextualize those numbers and other findings — including Latter-day Saint views on politics, abortion and climate change.

Pornography — broadly defined as sexually explicit images — has become a sort-of wallpaper of modern lives. It is everywhere: in our books, movies, computers, video games, social media posts, music and phones.

For many years, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint warned members that porn was “dangerous,” “evil” and “damnable.” They taught that viewing porn was a sin. In the past decade, though, the church has suggested that repeated porn watching is an addiction, like alcohol and drugs, often requiring professional help to overcome.

Earlier this month, apostle Patrick Kearon addressed attendees at the Utah Coalition Against Pornography conference, saying he was no expert but acknowledging he did have “painful and heartbreaking personal experience with loved ones entrapped by addictions.”

Some Latter-day Saint — and other — therapists now question the addiction hypothesis.

Count Idaho psychologist Cameron Staley, author of “Confessions of an LDS Sex Researcher” and creator of the “Life After Pornography” online program, among them. On this week’s show, he discusses whether viewing porn is a compulsive behavior; why men and women watch it; how the church has improved its rhetoric on the topic; and how to help those who want to stop looking at such images.

Joseph Fielding Smith’s family tree alone makes him a significant player in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

His father, Joseph F. Smith, was the faith’s sixth president. His grandfather was Hyrum Smith, who was slain with his great-uncle, church founder Joseph Smith. His son-in-law, in fact, was apostle Bruce R. McConkie, a theological kindred spirit.

Joseph Fielding Smith served as an apostle for 60 years, church historian for 49 and as the church’s 10th president for two. But he will forever be remembered more for his prose and his polemics than for his positions or his pedigree.

A conservative and orthodox thinker, he wrote more than two dozen books, answered religious questions from lay members and engaged in high-level, high-stakes debates with fellow apostles James Talmage, John Widtsoe and other leading Latter-day Saint intellectuals. They discussed, debated and disputed issues ranging from scriptural interpretation to the age of the Earth and the theory of evolution.

Joseph Fielding Smith was, scholar Matthew Bowman argues, “the most important Latter-day Saint theologian of the 20th century.”

On this week’s show, Bowman, head of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of the recently released “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian,” talks about this towering Latter-day Saint man of letters.

Certainly not for the first time, the United States has become a hotbed of hot takes and even hotter debates over men’s roles in the home and society. Fueling this fiery crisis of masculinity is, of course, social media, podcasts and other online forums.

Enter the “manosphere,” a conservative- and Christian-leaning media ecosystem aimed at male empowerment.

On this week’s show, Amy Chapman, a faculty member at Arizona State University’s teachers college, and Levi Sands, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Iowa, discuss this growing subculture and its influence on Latter-day Saint men.

When Brigham Young University teams play on the road, they, like any visiting opponent, expect to encounter their share of jeers from the home crowd. But what happens when the razzing turns raunchy and the boos give way to bigotry?

That occurs all too often at Cougar games. Obscene choruses, often emanating from opposing student sections, break out, mocking BYU’s sponsoring religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and members of that faith.

Why have Latter-day Saints and their beliefs become the target of such openly prejudiced chants? Do Catholics and Notre Dame run into the same hostility? And what, if anything, could or should BYU and Latter-day Saint leaders do in responding to such discrimination?

Answering those questions and more are Salt Lake Tribune sports writer Kevin Reynolds, who covers the Cougars and wrote about this issue in a recent special report, and Britain Covey, a practicing Latter-day Saint who starred at BYU’s rival school, the University of Utah, plays for the world champion Philadelphia Eagles and has deep familial ties to BYU.

Since America’s founding, Christianity has been a “load-bearing wall” of democracy, but in recent decades it has given up that role — and that, argues writer and scholar Jonathan Rauch, has led to the country’s current crisis.

In his latest book, “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy,” the self-described gay, Jewish atheist critiques secular Americans who think Christianity should be abandoned and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. He shows why the two must work together — and points to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an example of how to do it.

On this week’s show, Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, discusses why he believes top Latter-day Saint leaders, including senior apostle Dallin H. Oaks, have landed on a prescription for compromising and healing a polarized nation’s ills.