When I turned eighteen, I got a birthday card from my uncle Spence and aunt Emily. It had a picture of me taken on a family trip to Bryce Canyon the year before surround by a list of possible futures. “What will Steel become?” it asked. It imagined a world of possible futures: Father? Scholar? etc. The one that I remember most clearly, however, was ‘Heretic?’. At that time I was struggling, somewhat uncomfortably, to remain an orthodox, faithful Mormon, and Spence was one of my favorite people to talk to about religion, Mormonism, and philosophy. In a conversation earlier that year I had told him how disappointed I was not to have applied to Deep Springs College in time to meet their application deadline, and he mentioned that he had a friend, Jack Newell, who was President of the college. He also told me that Jack Newell was friends with Sterling McMurrin, one of Spence’s heroes. I was more than a little excited to hear this. I didn’t know a whole lot about him at the time, but I knew McMurrin as one of the ‘swearing elders’ (a group of heterodox Mormon intellectuals at the University of Utah who met regularly to discuss ideas related broadly to Mormonism) and as the author of The Theological Foundations of Mormonism, a book which I had read the previous summer, before coming to BYU, and which had pretty much blown my mind.