Wayfare has always been dedicated to championing the best in Latter-day Saint culture. For the last six months, that has included sharing important speeches from Mormon history to our Oratory newsletter in collaboration with Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory. This landmark anthology collects fifty-five speeches across the spectrum of belief to capture the rich diversity of public speaking over the last two hundred years of Church history.

This week, we’re excited to present the grand finale of this exclusive mini series: Orson F. Whitney’s famous “Home Literature” address from 1888, in which he promises that the Latter-day Saints will one day have “Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” Profiled by none other than Gideon Burton, this speech—perhaps more than any other—captures Wayfare’s ongoing commitment to the intersection of faith and creativity, art and inspiration.

You can read the other five sample chapters from Latter-day Eloquence in our Oratory section, which feature speeches by Melissa Inouye, Truman G. Madsen, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and a newly annotated text version of the King Follett Sermon. You can also order the print anthology for 30% off from the University of Illinois Press website using the discount code S26UIP.

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We strive to publish excellent and original contemporary talks, sermons, and addresses in our Oratory section (edited by Isaac Richards). If you have one you think we should consider publishing, submit it here.

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Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

fresh hay in
an old feeding trough

a place for
animals to eat

tonight—
bedding

a stable
barn
or cave?

i don’t know.

atop the 
hay was laid

a baby
newly born

wrapped in 
soft cloth

here—because 
no room
elsewhere

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Jarron Slater is an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he teaches rhetoric. He has published in a variety of academic journals and books, such as In the Classroom with Kenneth Burke, Style and the Future of Composition Studies, Thinking Through Memes, Journal of Communication and Religion, Rhetoric Review, and others.

I find it hard to forgive. I hold grudges and harbor unkind feelings for far too long. I even do this vicariously. If I think someone has harmed a member of my family or someone I love, they are moved onto the proverbial naughty list. No presents for them. I am easily offended. You don’t even need to do anything. I might be offended by how someone votes or by what they believe. Even as I write this, I find myself thinking of the alarmingly long list of people whom I tend to avoid because of some offense, real or imagined. Now, because I am English, these grudges and resentments are kept locked up inside, stewing and simmering away. I am inherently conflict-averse. I am outwardly polite. I will shake your hand and smile, while chuntering on the inside. Yes, I chunter. I am a major chunterer.1

I think it is part of the reason I find David to be so compelling. He was a champion chunterer. He chuntered to God about Saul (1 Samuel 20:1). He chuntered at Achish (1 Samuel 29:8). And, to come to the text at hand, he chuntered about the way he was treated by Nabal (1 Samuel 25:21–22). David disliked injustice. It offended him. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Nabal, David, and Abigail in Between

As 1 Samuel 25 opens, we find David, a fugitive leader of some six hundred men, on the run from King Saul. David has been living among the flocks and shepherds of a very wealthy man called Nabal during the winter, offering protection to both sheep and shepherds. When David hears that Nabal has started shearing the sheep, he sends some of his men to receive a gift from Nabal during this festive season for protecting his abundant flocks (did I mention that Nabal is very, very wealthy?). Instead of honoring this service with a generous gift, Nabal calls David a runaway slave, failing to recognize him as the anointed future king. He dismisses the young men whom David sent as unknown and undeserving beggars. David is offended. No, he is incensed. But, unlike me, David is not conflict-averse. He calls four hundred of his company to take up their swords, and they head towards Nabal’s household to exact revenge.

At this point, the narrative perspective shifts to Abigail, Nabal’s wife. To say that Nabal married up would be an understatement. This “woman was intelligent and beautiful,” while Nabal, “a Calebite, was a hard man and an evildoer” (1 Samuel 25:3, JPS). Even Nabal’s household didn’t like him. When one of them rushes to Abigail to report what Nabal has done, he cannot help but add that Nabal “is such a nasty fellow that no one can speak to him” (1 Samuel 25:17). Abigail acts quickly. She knows who David is and what he is capable of. So, she gathers up a generous gift for David and his men and rushes off to place herself between David and the certain destruction of everyone in her household.

And it’s lucky she did, because David had been marching, and chuntering, and working himself up: “Now David had been saying, ‘It was all for nothing that I protected that fellow’s possessions in the wilderness, and that nothing he owned is missing. He has paid me back evil for good. May God do thus and more to the enemies of David if, by the light of morning, I leave a single male of his’” (1 Samuel 25:21–22). No English reserve here.

Abigail reaches David and throws herself to the ground, pleading for peace. She does not seek to deflect or gaslight. She does not offer empty promises. She does not offer feigned empathy or say “your cause is just but I can do nothing for you.” Instead, Abigail makes things right. She provides the demands of justice. And in doing so, she is the protector and wise governess of her entire household. Had she met David’s emissaries, she says, things would have been different: “Please, my lord, pay no attention to that wretched fellow Nabal. For he is just what his name says: His name means ‘boor’ and he is a boor. Your handmaid did not see the young men whom my lord sent” (1 Samuel 25:25).

Abigail successfully sues for peace. She is every bit as intelligent as we were told, with that intelligence that is full of grace, good sense, and quick wit. She realizes that immediate action is necessary if she is to negotiate a peaceful détente. Abigail is also fearless, trusting in both David’s good character and her ability to appeal to it. Importantly, she also makes amends, presenting David and his men with a generous gift from the bounty of her household. Ultimately, she trusts in the Lord and that David is the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 28–31). Even David finds himself grateful for her intercession. He praises God for sending her, and to her he says, “And blessed be your prudence, and blessed be you yourself for restraining me from seeking redress in blood by my own hands” (1 Samuel 25:33).

When Abigail returns home and eventually tells her husband how she had saved their household, he is mortified. And “about ten days later the Lord struck Nabal and he died” (1 Samuel 25:37–38). David praises the Lord and immediately proposes to Abigail (1 Samuel 25:39–42).

I have a sense that buried within this marvelous story is the balm to cure my grudge- and offense-ridden heart. And I think the source of this balm has something to do with Abigail and the way she threw herself into the task of making peace. And I think it might also have something to do with the way that the Lord struck down Nabal. David, both protecting and chuntering, might also have a role to play.

Recent Scholarship on 1 Samuel 25

But first, let’s turn to the scholars and find out what the story may have meant in its ancient context.

The modern interpretative trajectory, in English at least, was set by Henry Preserved Smith, an avowed higher critic and Professor of Biblical History and Interpretation at Amherst College. He wrote his commentary on the Books of Samuel at the end of the nineteenth century. For him, the explanation of the story is primarily source critical. “The story,” he says, “seems to be drawn from the source from which, in subsequent chapters, we have David’s family history. The interest of the author is not in David’s method with the wealthy sheep owners, but in the way that he got a wife, and in the kind of wife he got.”2 From this view, Nabal, the servants, and even David’s actions serve to set the actions, and therefore the character, of Abigail in greater relief.

More recent scholars recognize, with Professor Smith, that Abigail is the hero of the story.3 But they are less interested in the source-critical method, tending to follow Brevard Childs and Robert Alter in reading the final form of the text rather than trying to distinguish and exposit possible preexisting sources. This canonical reading has further resulted in identifying intertextual resonances with the marriage of Rebekah (Genesis 24), and the Exodus narrative, with Nabal playing Pharaoh, the story of Ruth,4 and with the story of Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11).

Also, rather than seeing 1 Samuel 25 as an awkward interlude between two chapters dealing with David and Saul, chapters that Henry Smith thought were from different sources, scholars now consider 1 Samuel 24–26 to be a coherent unit. These three chapters wrestle with the relationship between Saul and David, with the middle chapter using narrative analogy to talk about Saul through the figure of Nabal.5 The overarching theme is avoiding blood-guilt from either slaying the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 24:11; 26:9) or shedding innocent blood (1 Samuel 25:30–31).

Scholars also see 1 Samuel 25 as a proleptic narrative, pointing forward to a future event but with two quite different events in mind—either the death of Saul in 1 Samuel 31, or the death of Uriah instigated by David to facilitate the marriage with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11.6

Beyond literary connections, scholars have also tried to discern the realpolitik at play in the narrative. Was David innocently protecting Nabal’s flocks and shepherd, or was this some kind of protection racket? Did the death of Nabal and the marriage to Abigail advance David’s path to kingship?7 What honor codes were at play in Abigail’s behavior?8 These questions have helped scholars place this story in its sociological setting and led them to see 1 Samuel 25 as a pivotal moment in David’s ascent to the throne, aided by significant wealth and a brilliant, strategically minded wife.

A Pastoral Reading of 1 Samuel 25

I leave this review of the scholarship with a greater sense of the richness of this chapter, its context, and intertexts. I understand better the complexity of the narrative and the developing figure of David. And I have a better sense of how this story might have been understood in its historical setting. The figure of Abigail has taken on even greater importance, even if that importance was intended primarily to accrue to David. I also have a growing sense of how the work of scholars can contribute the balm I need to cure my grudge- and offense-ridden heart. To put it all together, however, I need to venture out on my own. So here goes.

First, I realize that I am not David, despite the chuntering. He had much greater reason to be offended and hold grudges than I do. I am not on the run. No one, let alone God’s anointed leader, is trying to kill me. No one has even returned me evil for good. I’m not in the business of freely taking care of the sheep and the shepherds.

I am, however, frequently Nabal. Nabal is both a character and a caricature. “The characterization of Nabal begins with his very name,” says the Harvard Bible scholar Jon Levenson, a name “which is, in fact, a form of character assassination.” Imagine me squirming as I continue with this quotation. “The Hebrew word nābāl, often translated as ‘fool,’ designates not a harmless simpleton, but rather a vicious, materialistic, and egocentric misfit.” Bit harsh. But I’m too far in to go back now. Levenson continues:

Other passages present the nābāl as an embarrassment to his father (Prov 17:21), a glutton (Prov 30:22), a hoarder (Jer 17:11), and even an atheist (Psalm 14:1). Most significant for our purposes is Isa 32:6, in which the refusal to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, precisely the sin of Nabal in 1 Samuel 25, is listed among the characteristic of the nābāl.

Now, that passage from Levenson was hard reading, but this Isaiah passage really gets the point home:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

No longer will the fool be called noble;
nor the villain be termed honorable.
For the fool utters foolishness,
and his mind plots evil, 
to do foul things,
to utter error about the Lord,
to keep empty the throat of the hungry man,
to deprive the thirsty of drink.
As for the villain, his actions are vile,
he counsels deviousness,
to deprive men of their rights through lies,
even when the claim of the poor man is just.
But the noble man counsels only noble things,
and stands his ground in his nobility. 

(Isaiah 32:5–8, Levenson’s translation)9

Levenson goes on with his description of the nābāl as rendered in 1 Samuel 25. But I’m going to stop there and just sit with that for a moment.

Could it be that I am entirely self-deceived? Am I a fool uttering foolishness when I convince myself that my grudges are justified, that my unkind feelings are warranted, that my judgments are in any way just? Am I depriving my brothers and sisters of their rights through lies—that is, am I imagining lies about people, and thus depriving them of the right to be seen for who they are?

It turns out that the balm that I thought I needed is actually a bitter draft. And the bitterest part is still to come, because Nabal’s chief fault in this story is failing to recognize David. Now, it is difficult not to think that from a pastoral perspective, David stands in this story for the Son of David, Jesus. And the greatest tragedy of the fool is failing to recognize Jesus. This is the message of so much of the New Testament, especially those poignant verses in Matthew 25:3–40 that inspired “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.”

Now, the judgment day has not yet come, and there is still time to repent. There is still time for renewal and reconciliation. There is still time to become a new creature. “And the Lord said unto me: Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming sons and daughters; and thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God” (Mosiah 27:25–26).

I suspect the model of this new creature is Abigail. The name Abigail means “The Father is rejoicing.” Imagine that. Imagine becoming the kind of person who makes the Father rejoice. And what is it that makes the Father rejoice? I think the answer is found in Abigail’s actions in 1 Samuel 25, which can be encapsulated by the idea of peacemaking. Abigail made peace. When justice was due, Abigail made peace. When bad was given for good, Abigail made peace. When the food was withheld, Abigail made peace. When her household was in peril, Abigail stepped in between and made peace.

When I think of this wonderful chapter now, I see myself differently. I thought I was David, but all the while I have actually been Nabal. Though, even as I see myself in Nabal, even as I recognize the depths of my own foolishness, I find hope. I realize that I could become Abigail. I was a fool, but through Christ, I can become wise. I can become a peacemaker. I can be someone who stands in between. I can make the Father rejoice. That’s the balm that I was seeking.

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Kristian S. Heal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His research focuses on the reception of the Hebrew Bible in early Christian literature and worship. He received a BA in Jewish History from University College London, an MSt in Syriac studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Theology from the University of Birmingham.

Art by Antonio Cortina Farinós (1841–1890).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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We knew moving the cats across the country was going to be difficult—a huge investment of time and money, but we couldn’t find any way around the fact that we loved these particular cats and we wanted them with us.

Our adult children flew Jaxy and Q-tip across the country to us and then flew themselves back to the home we used to know. The rest of us adjusted to our new life in Northern Virginia—the desert was replaced by forty-foot trees, a veritable Garden of Eden.

Unfortunately, Jaxy and Q-tip didn’t feel like this was paradise. They marked their new territory, fought with each other for dominance, and made it dirty and unpleasant for everyone else.

After several days of this, I angrily put them in the garage, showed them their (unused!) litter box again, and shut the door. In a heap of frustration and exhaustion, I complained about them to my husband.

The next morning, seeing the animals had once again missed the litter box, my husband opened the garage and the cats ran out.

He came to me matter-of-factly, explaining that the cats were wandering the neighborhood like they did back in Utah. But I hadn’t yet taken them outside often, and their marking had been almost entirely inside our house, not in our yard. Their return would be nearly impossible.

I listened in shock and fear. What would we tell the kids?

Three hours later, after calling for them repeatedly, I spotted Jaxy in a neighbor’s yard and he quickly ran to me. But there was no sign of Q-tip anywhere.

At our previous home she had come when I called. Why wouldn’t she come?

We put out some food, and even made Jaxy sit in his carrier crate on the back porch as night fell. His pitiful meows echoed through the neighborhood, pleading for release. We hoped Q-tip would hear his cries and come try to rescue him or at least use his voice as a homing beacon. But no luck.

We prayed. A lot. Mostly we prayed for forgiveness for our anger. We would figure out a way to deal with the bad behavior if we could just get her back. We prayed for her safe return. By the end of the week, we had been praying and calling for her repeatedly throughout the day with no sign of her whereabouts. We didn’t want to consider that the worst that could possibly happen was the most likely scenario—there were, after all, a lot of foxes in the area.

Imagine our surprise when our eight-year-old, while riding her bike through the neighborhood, spotted Q-tip under a bush about fifty yards away from our house. She ran and picked the cat up, and our other son who was with her took the unruly cat and brought her home while she clawed him and tried to escape.

Our prayers were answered! It was a miracle that she was still alive after seven days of being on her own. What had she survived on? Frogs? Salamanders? Where had she slept? What did she drink?

Why was she fighting her rescue?

We didn’t let her out of the house for a few days, but gradually she went back outside for brief periods of time. I guarded her well and brought her home if I sensed she was about to stray.

Alas, a week later, Q-tip and Jaxy got spooked while they were outside with me. Although the back door of the house was open and they could have retreated to safety, they once again disappeared. Jaxy returned again a few hours later, zipping through the open door then collapsing in exhaustion. By the end of the day, it was clear that Q-tip wasn’t coming back.

It was heartbreaking losing Q-tip. Again.

She was a precious member of our family. I assumed that she could hear my voice but would not come when I called. It made me think about the Savior’s words, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. . . . My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:14, 27).

The difference between Jaxy and Q-tip was that Jaxy trusted me enough to come when I called. I assume Q-tip could hear me, but she wouldn’t heed me. She didn’t trust me enough to yield her will to mine.

It made me think. Do I race off into strangers’ yards when things go awry or do I retreat to the protection of places where my Master dwells? Do I take refuge in sacred spaces? Do I come when my Good Shepherd calls?

We could seek out the lost cat and bring her back, but she had to decide that it was truly her home. She had to feel deep inside her that she was part of this new household. That this fold we had brought her to was not a constraint but a refuge.

Against all odds, as I was washing dishes six days after her second disappearance, I saw a flash of white in the neighbor’s yard. I gasped and ran to the back door, throwing it open. I called her name and she hesitatingly came in. Parched and thin, she gulped the clean water that I gave her.

Now it appeared she had learned her lesson. The first time she was lost was justifiable. No one could blame her for being scared and running—especially in the face of our anger. But this second time settled the matter. Home was where she belonged, not out in the lone and dreary world—no matter how paradisiacal it seemed. Now she surely knew that this was the place she wanted to be. Certainly.

And yet.

Three days later, I found myself laying on my new neighbor’s driveway, trying to pull our cat out from under their car. I could reach one leg. If I just got a good grip, I could pull her out from this spiral. Why wouldn’t she just obey?

After all of the expense of medical checkups, boarding her, flying her out here. We had put so much into keeping her part of our family!

I felt a well of frustration bubbling up. She kept running away for days at a time, breaking our hearts with worry. No. I wasn’t doing this again. I’d had enough. This cat was coming inside. Right now.

That’s when I had a distinct impression: You will hurt her, and by hurting her she will trust you even less. You cannot force her to come. You will hurt her.

The feeling of distraught protectiveness left me. Deflated, I stood, dusted myself off, and walked back home. But this time I sensed that this is the way it’s supposed to be. For cats and others.

Many of us welcome children into our homes through great efforts. We journey far from heaven, patterning our homes after that first one in the hopes that it will feel familiar and welcoming.

Yet mortality happens, and we frequently annoy, and sometimes wound, those we interact with most—our family. Sometimes unintentionally. Sometimes in anger. Sometimes we are driven apart from the overcorrection and complaints of others that shape our perception of ourselves and feed the lie that we don’t belong. Sometimes those we love are lost to strange roads where fear drives them or curiosity beckons them.

Sometimes our cats and our children run away. Again. And again. And again.

At such times, echoes of heaven remind us we cannot keep them here nor make them stay. They must choose to come home.

The anguish and guilt we feel over any prodigal is sometimes so large that we don’t set it aside to do the real work of loving. Instead, we try to fix the situation ourselves. We try to save the one who is lost, preferably through kindness but sometimes through different, useless strategies. We might flirt with where guidance stops and coercion starts. It doesn’t work.

One thing I have learned: You can’t do God’s work using Satan’s tactics.

Yanking on legs doesn’t help the situation.

It is not my job to try to save the ones I love. There’s a Savior for that. My feeble efforts to “save” usually complicate the situation, and sometimes even leave wounds.

I have learned these truths about loving my children and my pets:

It is my job to extinguish my fear so that they don’t mistake my anxiety for unbelief in their capacity, strength, and resilience to face the world outside our home.

It is their job to boldly act. To embark. To explore. To choose. To experience.

If they do get hurt, I hope they will come home. Come home with the scratches from feral cats and the bloody bite marks of a fox on their flank. I will help them heal. We will clean it together. I will get them medicine or doctors or both.

My job is to make home such a lovely place that they crave being here.

Their job is to find their way back. Use the kitty door their Father installed. It’s always open.

God cares about lost cats. He cares about one sheep among ninety-nine others. He cares about one coin among ten. One soul is priceless.

So as darkness falls, I open my door, pushing down a knot of worry.

And I call. Again.

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Miranda enjoys re-watching favorite movies, spending time with family and friends, and composing music. Her writing often focuses on the overlap between caregiving and discipleship.

Art by Franz Marc (1880–1916), Cornelis Visscher (1629–1658), Takahashi Hiroaki (1871–1945), and Gwen John (1876–1939).

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Orson F. Whitney (1855–1931) was a renowned Mormon man of letters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a journalist, newspaper editor, educator, poet, and historian. When Whitney delivered his “Home Literature” address, he was thirty-three and recently returned from a mission to England, where he edited the Church’s Millennial Star. At the time, he was bishop of a Salt Lake City ward that he would lead for twenty-eight years. The grandson of the Church’s second bishop, Newel K. Whitney, Orson would later serve twenty-five years as an apostle.

The occasion for Whitney’s speech was the annual summer conference of the YMMIA (Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association) held June 2–3, 1888. Although primarily for Church youth and their leaders, this weekend gathering was a de facto general conference of the Church, consisting of several hours-long sessions of speeches and many musical performances by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and others. Thousands attended.

Over time, Whitney’s “Home Literature” address has been received as a prophetic blessing upon Mormon authors and artists, summed up in Whitney’s heady proclamation, “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”1 As an accomplished orator, Whitney used his hortatory rhetoric to move the youth toward better appreciation of the world’s literary achievements and greater confidence in achieving their own. Home literature meant more than Mormon-authored poetry or novels; it meant becoming at home with literature’s powers and scope; it meant matching those powers to the scope of Mormon belief and the breadth of Mormon experience.

“Home Literature” would be the term used by later Mormon man of letters Eugene England to label the LDS literary period from 1880 to 1930. This period marked the first flowering of an independent Mormon literature attempting to fulfill Whitney’s vision—though, as England notes, such writing was largely amateur fiction and poetry of a didactic nature.2 Home literature still labels a genre of popular writing that emerged in the LDS book market in the 1970s (mostly historical, young adult, or romance fiction) that is largely by, about, and for Mormons.

The origins of Home Literature, however, were not, in fact, literary. Leading up to Whitney’s speech had been decades of Mormon economic enterprises known collectively as “home industries”—such as sugar beet cultivation as a cash crop, a local silk industry, and especially the many home-produced goods families made and marketed via Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution. Home literature in 1888 would have been understood by Whitney’s audience as a rhetorical adaptation of home industries, and it would have suggested a similar sense of spiritual purpose and pride of community production.

The rhetoric of a special, self-sufficient culture was actually at the root of the Church’s nascent youth program. What would become the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association (YWMIA) began in 1870 as a young ladies’ retrenchment society whose purpose was “to effect reform in dress, to resist the influences of the world, in fashion, and to set the fashions of Zion for themselves.”3 Two decades on, the Church’s youth program would include young men and a much broader scope, but the idea of setting Zion’s own fashions, creating culture by one’s own standards, remained: “Above all things, we must be original,” Whitney asserts. “Our literature must live and breathe for itself. Our mission is diverse from all others; our literature must also be.”

Serious Mormon literary efforts soon followed Whitney’s call for a home literature. But preceding all of this was a manifest LDS commitment to oral communication. Debating clubs in Salt Lake City predated the Church’s youth program. Then, as the MIA groups became integral to Mormon life between 1870 and 1890, these created Church-wide opportunities for practicing public address. By the time Whitney spoke in 1888, instruction in practical rhetoric had been so formalized in the youth program that each local association routinely submitted statistics to the general leadership on the number of declamations, or practice orations, given. For example, for the year ending May 31, 1888, a total of 1,705 declamations were reported to have been given across thirty member associations—as well as a total of 6,487 “Testimonies Borne.”4 Thus, when the youth gathered at conferences like the one at which Whitney spoke, they were observing models of the kinds of speakers the Youth program was already actively preparing them to become.

In his speech, Whitney uses a youthful zeal to appeal to Zion’s youth: “You must be in earnest. You must feel what you write, if you wish it to be felt by others. If the words you speak are not as red-hot embers from the flaming forge of a sincere and earnest soul, they will never set on fire the souls of your hearers.” To such romanticized earnestness Whitney adds the language of prophetic speech: “In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may now be low in earth.”

Shoring up those low foundations and reaching such high ambitions would require serious work, including due appreciation of the broader world of books and literature. This is why Whitney begins with and circles back repeatedly to a core passage of LDS scripture, a latter-day commandment that has been a hallmark of Mormon education to this day: “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”5

Whitney has clearly taken that charge seriously himself. Interestingly, while he equates literature with learning, he does not equate the “best books” with scripture alone; indeed, he urges a wider view:

Literature means learning, and it is from the “best books” we are told to seek it. This does not merely mean [scripture]. But it also means history, poetry, philosophy, art and science, languages, government—all truth in fact, wherever found, either local or general, and relating to times past, present or to come.

Here the expansiveness of classical liberalism intersects the expansiveness of Mormon theology. He is invoking the Greek concept of paideia or the Roman studia humanitatis—exposure and engagement with the breadth of human culture. But this is not simply preparation for adulthood or public life; this is education for the eternities. Mormons are taught to understand God, and themselves, as forever in development, in mutual and permanent progression.6

Whitney’s ideals for education were complemented by an effort to implement them. In the same meeting, the YMMIA leadership announced a five-year course of reading for Mormon youth, to include works of history and science, as well as both “general literature” and “home literature.”7 Organized church programs would prove to be a long-standing mechanism for Mormons to steep themselves in literary works for study and imitation. If the Mormon people could not have their own Shakespeare without reading his sonnets or appreciating Hamlet, then they must do that reading. And they did.8 The formal study and appreciation of literature begun in the LDS youth program in the late 1880s would be furthered within the women’s Relief Society, where for sixty years (from the 1910s to the 1970s), one in four monthly lessons were on appreciating specific literary works or authors.9

Learning to write was also built into the youth organization, with local MIA groups gathering statistics on essays both read and written. The Church sponsored multiple periodicals expressly as outlets for budding authors. The Contributor magazine (1879–96), where Whitney’s address appeared, had been given its title to encourage Mormon youth to submit and publish their amateur work.10 In various Church magazines for decades to come, there would be articles analyzing “the best books,” lesson materials on literary works and authors, articles about how to write, and a dizzying array of amateur poems, stories, and contributor essays.

Whitney’s call for a Mormon literature was answered by both Church members and Church programs. His vision was realized in substantive ways through curricula, activities, contests, and ample opportunities to publish. Growing up in the 1970s, my own literary ambition was fueled by getting a brief article published through a Church writing contest. My upbringing was also very much shaped by the MIA program that, among other activities, provided ideal circumstances for performing on a stage and speaking at a pulpit.

Whitney’s “Home Literature” provided an animating vision for Mormon youth and LDS artists of future generations. His dual legacy is to have inspired a humanistic breadth to Mormon education and to have motivated generations of aspiring authors and artists to bring to their craft a Mormon sensibility and purpose. It is also worth noting that Whitney’s literary vision was delivered orally, and that even within the speech’s written form it retains the dynamism of the spoken word with its rallying rhythms and elevated tones. “A world awaits you,” he proclaims, “rich and poor, high and low, learned and unlearned”—the parallel antitheses building up the emotion. “All must be preached to; all must be sought after; all must be left without excuse”—the repeated and parallel openings further amplifying feeling. “And whither we cannot go, we must send; where we cannot speak we must write; and in order to win men with our writings we must know how and what to write.” Here, he is enjoining the literary but doing so through the ear-pleasing patterns of anadiplosis and alliteration. He is reveling in the performative escalations of oral eloquence. It is as though, even in ink and a century later, Whitney is still using a voice to be heard in a room filled with thousands.

Home Literature (1888)

Orson F. Whitney11

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

—Doctrine and Covenants 88:118

The words I have quoted are the words of the Prophet Joseph Smith; or rather, they are the words of the Almighty through him to this people. A people who are popularly supposed to be enemies of education, despisers of learning, haters of books and schools, and of everything, in fact, that is pure, ennobling and refined. A greater mistake was never made, a crueler wrong was never committed, a more heinous moral crime was never perpetrated than when the “Mormon” people, [the people of] the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were thus made odious in the eyes of mankind. For, if it be a crime to filch from an individual his good name, that “immediate jewel of the soul,” compared with which, as the poet tells us, to steal one’s purse is to “steal trash,” what must it be to rob a whole community of reputation? A community, too, with such a mission as ours; the spiritual enlightenment of a world, the salvation of the human race, the education, for this life and the life which is to come, of all who can be persuaded to enter the garden of God and partake, freely, of the precious fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, which, in the truest sense, is also the Tree of Life. To rob such a people of their good name, thus limiting their usefulness, and hindering them from fulfilling their great mission, which is to draw all men unto Christ by means of knowledge, wisdom, and learning revealed from heaven and recorded in the best of books, is indeed a crime, not only against the immediate victims of the slander, but a crime against God and humanity.

But it is not my present purpose to pursue the subject to which this train of thought would naturally lead. It suffices me to know, and to testify, that this people are the friends, not the foes, of education; that they are seekers after wisdom, lovers of light and truth, universal Truth, which, like the waters of earth, or the sunbeams of heaven, has but one Source, let its earthly origin be what it may.

“Truth is truth, wher’er ’tis found,
On Christian or on heathen ground,”

and worthy of our love and admiration, whether far or near, high or low, whether blazing as a star in the blue vault of heaven, or springing like a floweret from the soil.

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study, and also by faith.”

Why did the Lord so instruct his Prophet? Why did the Prophet so teach his people? It was because God had designed, and his prophet had foreseen, a great and glorious future for that people. Chosen himself in weakness, so far as this world’s wisdom was concerned, as a foundation stone of the mighty structure which is destined to tower heavenward, reflecting from its walls and glittering spires the splendors of eternity, he knew there must come a time, unless God, who cannot lie, had sworn falsely, when Zion, no longer the foot, but as the head, the glorious front of the world’s civilization, would arise and shine “the joy of the whole earth”—the seat of learning, the source of wisdom, and the centre of political power; when, side by side with pure Religion, would flourish Art and Science, her fair daughters; when music, poetry, painting, sculpture, oratory, and the drama, rays of light from the same central sun, no longer refracted and discolored by the many-hued prisms of man’s sensuality, would throw their white radiance full and direct upon the mirrorlike glory of her towers; when the science of earth and the wisdom of heaven would walk hand in hand interpreting each other; when philosophy would drink from wells of living truth, no longer draining the deadly hemlock of error, to poison the pure air with the illusions of sophistry; when love and union would prevail; when war would sit at the feet of peace and learn wisdom for a thousand years; when Zion’s sons and Zion’s daughters, as famed for intelligence and culture as for purity, truth and beauty, “polished after the similitude of a palace,” would entertain kings and nobles, yea, sit upon thrones themselves, or go forth, like shafts of light from the bow of the Almighty, as messengers and ambassadors to the nations.

Joseph saw all this. He knew it was inevitable; that such things were but the natural flowers and fruits of the work which God had planted. The roots of the tree might not show it so well—their mission is to lie hidden in the earth despised and trampled on of men—but the branches in a day to come would prove it. Joseph knew, as every philosopher must know, that purity is the natural parent of beauty; that truth is the wellspring of power, and righteousness the sun of supremacy. He knew that his people must progress, that their destiny demanded it; that culture is the duty of man, as intelligence is the glory of God. Rough and rugged himself, as the granite boulders of yonder hills, typical of the firm, unyielding basis of God’s work, he knew, and his brethren around him knew, that on the rough, strong stones of which they were symbolical—the massive foundations of the past—the great Architect would rear the superstructure of the future; that the youth of Israel, their offspring, would be inspired to build upon the foundations of the fathers, and yet would differ from their fathers and mothers, as the foundations of a building must differ from the walls and spires.

What shall I say, my young brethren and sisters, what can I say to awaken in your hearts, if perchance it sleeps, the desire to realize this glorious anticipation? Alas! What can my poor pen indite? What can my feeble tongue utter to rouse within you this determination? I can only call upon God, in humility, to make my words as sparks of fire, to fall upon the tinder of your hearts and kindle them into flame. That from this hour your souls may be lit up with the light of your glorious destiny, that you may live and labor for God and his kingdom, not simply for yourselves and the perishable things of earth.

[. . .]

But what has all this to do with literature? you ask. More, perhaps, than is at first apparent. It is by means of literature that much of this great work will have to be accomplished: a literature of power and purity, worthy of such a work. And a pure and powerful literature can only proceed from a pure and powerful people. Grapes are not gathered of thorns, nor figs of thistles.

I am not here, my friends, to tickle your ears with tinkling phrases, to deliver a learned lecture on Greek and Roman mythology, to quote Hebrew and Latin, or stun you with sound and bewilder you with a pedantic display of erudition. No! Experience has taught me that it is the heart, not simply the head we must appeal to if we wish to stir the soul. The intellect may shine, but it is the bosom that burns and warms into life every movement that is born to bless humanity. Therefore, speak to your hearts, and I would rather say three words by the power of the Holy Ghost than lecture here for three hours on the fables of Greece and Rome.

Wake up! Ye sons and daughters of God! Trim your lamps and go forth to meet your destiny. A world awaits you: rich and poor, high and low, learned and unlearned. All must be preached to. All must be sought after. All must be left without excuse. And whither we cannot go, we must send. Where we cannot speak we must write. In order to win men with our writings we must know how and what to write. If the learned will only listen to the learned, God will send them learned men to meet them on their own ground and show them that “Mormonism,” the Gospel of Christ, is not only the gospel of truth but the gospel of intelligence and culture. The Lord is not above doing this. He is merciful to all men, not willing that any should perish or have it to say they were unfairly dealt with. For over fifty years the gospel has been preached to the poor and lowly. It will yet go to the high and mighty, even to kings and nobles, and penetrate and climb to places hitherto deemed inaccessible. Our literature will help to take it there; for this, like all else with which we have to do, must be made subservient to the building up of Zion.

But remember this, ye writers and orators of the future! It is for God’s glory, not man’s. Let not vanity and pride possess you. Without humility there is no power. You must be in earnest. You must feel what you write, if you wish it to be felt by others. If the words you speak are not as red-hot embers from the flaming forge of a sincere and earnest soul, they will never set on fire the souls of your hearers. The days of buncombe and bombast are over. Over? They never had a beginning. Nothing really is that is not founded on fact.

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom: seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

The advantages of learning over ignorance are so self-evident as to need no dissertation. Knowledge is power, in this world or in any other. The Prophet Joseph is authority for the saying that “a man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge.” That “it is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance”; “for,” says he, “if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power in the other world, as evil spirits will have more knowledge and consequently more power than many men who are on the earth.” The Prophet also says that whatever principles of intelligence we attain to in this life, they will rise with us in the resurrection; and if one soul by its diligence and faithfulness acquires more knowledge than another, it will have just so much advantage in the world to come.

How little, then, they know of “Mormonism,” who say and think it is opposed to education. “With all thy getting, get understanding” is no less a part of the “Mormon” creed than it is one of the pearls of the wisdom of Solomon.

“Seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

The formation of a home literature is directly in the line and spirit of this injunction. Literature means learning, and it is from the “best books” we are told to seek it. This does not merely mean the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the book of Doctrine and Covenants, Church works and religious writings—though these indeed are “the best books,” and will ever be included in and lie at the very basis of our literature. But it also means history, poetry, philosophy, art, and science, languages, government—all truth in fact, wherever found, either local or general, and relating to times past, present, or to come.

[. . .]

It is from the warp and woof of all learning, so far as we are able to master it and make it ours, that the fabric of our literature must be woven. We must read, and think, and feel, and pray, and then bring forth our thoughts, and polish and preserve them. This will make literature.

Above all things, we must be original. The Holy Ghost is the genius of “Mormon” literature. Not Jupiter, nor Mars, Minerva, nor Mercury. No fabled gods and goddesses; no Mount Olympus. No “sisters nine,” no “blue-eyed maid of heaven,” no invoking of mythical muses that “did never yet one mortal song inspire.” No pouring of new wine into old bottles. No patterning after the dead forms of antiquity. Our literature must live and breathe for itself. Our mission is diverse from all others, our literature must also be. The odes of Anacreon, the satires of Horace and Juvenal, the epics of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, the sublime tragedies of Shakespeare these are all excellent, all well enough in their way, but we must not attempt to copy them. They cannot be reproduced. We may read, we may gather sweets from all these flowers, but we must build our own hive and honeycomb after God’s supreme design.

We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God’s ammunition is not exhausted. His brightest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may now be low in earth. Let the smile of derision wreathe the face of scorn. Let the frown of hatred darken the brow of bigotry. Small things are the seeds of great things, and, like the acorn that brings forth the oak, or the snowflake that forms the avalanche, God’s kingdom will grow, and on wings of light and power soar to the summit of its destiny.

Let us onward, then, and upward, keeping the goal in view; living not in the dead past, nor for the dying present. The future is our field. Eternity is before us.

“New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of Truth.
Lo! before us gleam her campfires,
We, ourselves, must pilgrims be;
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly
Through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the future’s portal
With the past’s blood-rusted key.”

I do not mean to depreciate, or speak slightingly of the literature of the past: such of it, at least, as is worthy of the name. Far be it from me to utter one word that might reasonably be so construed. I wish I had power to tell you what I think literature has done for the human race: what men of letters have accomplished in all ages, from Moses to Herodotus. From Herodotus to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Goethe and Carlyle; men who have poured the rich treasures of inspired thought and intelligent research into the lap of humanity, giving birth to civilization and filling earth with fame and glory. I would also speak of the press, that modern giant, that great engine of power, scattering far and wide the embers of intelligence, kindling on ten thousand times ten thousand hearthstones the fires of thought and noble aspiration; the newspaper, the daily history of the world, champion of truth and defender of the oppressed. How mighty its mission, how far-reaching its influence, how invincible its power! Oh, that it should ever be prostituted, dragged in the mire, degraded to ignoble ends! But alas! it often is so.

Therefore, choose between the false and true, between the unreal and the genuine. “Seek ye out of the best books—the best newspapers—words of wisdom.” Write for the papers, write for the magazines—especially our home publications—subscribe [to] them and read them. Make books yourselves that shall not only be a credit to you and to the land and people that produced you, but likewise a boon and benefaction to mankind.

It is impossible to compute in figures, or express in words, the blessings that books and bookmakers have been to humanity. Let me quote from one whose masterly attempt is perhaps halfway successful. Says Carlyle:

“In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb, mournful wrecks and blocks: but the books of Greece! Their Greece, to every thinker. still very literally lives.”

“With the art of writing, of which printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced.” “The writer of a book, is not he a preacher, preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men, in all times and places?”

[. . .]

“Men of letters are a perpetual priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life .. In the true literary man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness; he is the light of the world; the world’s priest; guiding it like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time.”

Let us now, for a moment, in the light of this noble interpretation, contemplate the work of a book, a book with which we are all more or less familiar.

Nearly four hundred years have passed away since Columbus discovered America. He found here what? Forests and Indians, and tropical fruits; little else. But they who came after him found more. Peeping from the crust of the earth, north and south, east and west, were the relics of a civilization that had put to shame the glory of Egypt in her palmiest days. Nations had risen and fallen on this fair land before, whose fame and power the strength of Rome and the wealth of Asia would have paled as stars before the sun. Whence came they? What were their names? Why had they fallen? None knew. The sad sea waves and the sighing winds answered not, but continued to chant in mournful numbers their solemn requiem for the dead. The natives could not tell, except in tales and traditions as vague and shadowy as the legends of the Druids, or the runic fables of the Norsemen. Who, then, would answer? One day a little boy went into the woods and prayed. God answered him and gave him more than he asked. A book came forth by the power of God; a buried record hidden in a hill. It told the story of the past, it prophesied of the future, and from that hour, Joseph Smith, the despised Mormon Prophet, became the real discoverer of America.

My brothers and sisters—fellow laborers in the vineyard of our Lord—let me hope if I have said anything, it is something that will stimulate and encourage you to press onward in the work of God. Follow not after the world. Avoid the snares of Satan. Be true to yourselves and loyal to your mission. Ye are the “hope of Israel.” The heavens are watching you, and the earth is waiting for you.

“Awake, awake! Put on thy strength, O Zion! Put on thy beautiful garments”—the garments of wisdom and learning, that it may no longer be said of thee, with even a semblance of truth, or a shadow of reason, that thou art not what we say thou art, and all that the Lord thy God has said thou shalt be. Arise, shine, for thy light will come, and the Glory of the Lord will rise upon thee! “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” The star of truth has risen; the Sun of Righteousness will come; the night of error is past, and above the eastern hilltops, even now, are breaking the golden splendors of the dawn.

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Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Gideon Burton is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he teaches Renaissance literature, literature of the Latter-day Saints, and rhetoric.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

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“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” writes Pope Leo in his 40,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence, “is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

It’s a stark contrast, the Tower of Babel or the City of God. As Pope Leo writes, Babel was “supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” while the City of God, by contrast, “rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones” and “rediscovers a common language—not one of uniformity, but one of communion.”

In short, the City of God celebrates multiplicity founded in humility. It’s the Body of Christ, where “the body is not one member but many.” In this spirit, Pope Leo doesn’t limit his message to Catholics, but expands it to include all people, believers and nonbelievers alike. He writes, “The Church regards all who sincerely seek ‘truth, goodness and beauty’ as companions on the journey, and considers them as ‘precious allies’ in defending the dignity of every person.”

I personally feel called as a companion on the journey to focus on my cultural setting—namely, the Wasatch Front in Utah. It was here that I recently attended a presentation by Jon Cheney, founder of the General AI Proficiency Institute, which helps employees use AI to handle “drudgery and repetitive work” so they can “adapt, create, and take responsibility for meaningful work.” Cheney created this business in a weekend and booked his first client five days later, leading him to be featured in the news and mentioned on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most-listened-to podcast.

For Cheney, the core concern around AI has to do with maintaining our individual agency, which, alluding to a Latter-day Saint scripture, he defines as “the choice to act rather than be acted upon.” This is the central sentiment of his company’s manifesto (or “doctrine,” as Cheney calls it). It’s also a sentiment I encounter frequently in different tech circles on the Wasatch Front—a sentiment I find simultaneously inspiring and troubling.

Namely, I’m inspired by the call to avoid mindlessly giving my eyeballs (and by extension my life) over to companies that don’t have my best interest in mind. I’m also inspired by Cheney’s call for a new way of living. He writes that he longs for a life centered on “deep human connection, creative problem solving, ethical and philosophical guidance, and hands-on craftsmanship.” This call appeals to me deeply, and I long for this same thing—a world where people do work that matters with people they love.

Yet I question Cheney’s underlying assumptions about AI and agency, and, given how widespread these assumptions are today, I feel a sense of urgency to spell out a few counterarguments—not to dismiss Cheney personally (again, I share his call for deep human connection) but to add a measure of caution in the spirit of Pope Leo.

Cheney writes that he is “unapologetically pro-AI” and urges people to use the technology or get left behind.1 “History shows,” he writes, “that when individuals or organizations fail to adapt to technological change, the outcome is usually a gradual decline—or even worse—catastrophic collapse. Entire companies, careers, and communities disappear, not because they were immoral or lazy, but because they failed to learn, adapt, and act in time.”

What goes unsaid here, however, is why slow-adapting communities collapse. It’s not because humans need advanced technology to survive, since we existed (albeit uncomfortably) for hundreds of millennia with rudimentary technology.2 Rather, it’s often because powerful people with advanced technology use their agency in short-sighted and destructive ways.

In addition, the notion that agency is strictly defined as “the choice to act rather than be acted upon” fails to recognize the way in which agency also includes a passive element—a willingness to surrender to that which is beyond our control, including certain aspects of the physical world such as finite natural resources.3 This passive element is also part of agency. Again, a willingness to let go.

Cheney doesn’t acknowledge any of this. Instead, he simply says that “the future does not belong to those who wait. It belongs to those who choose to act.”

But we might ask: What if the primary problem we’re facing is that “those who choose to act” aren’t as introspective, generous, or wise as they should be? What if the problem isn’t so much a lack of bold action, but a lack of wisdom, which weaves together the active and passive elements of agency?

Such questions make me reflect on how early Latter-day Saint settlers damaged Utah Lake, a lake I’ve lived near since childhood. When Latter-day Saints immigrated to this area and built Fort Utah in what became Provo, they fought the native tribes,4 seized control of the lake, and immediately got to work fishing it. Within a decade, they’d overfished it.

Then, committing to “act rather than be acted upon,” they (in conjunction with the US government) re-filled the lake with carp, an invasive species that sludged up the waters and decimated the ecosystem.

If that weren’t enough, as recently as 1967, local inhabitants routed sewage into the lake, further polluting an already compromised body of water. This combination of carp and crap—coupled with algae blooms—gave the lake a reputation of being unsanitary and unusable, a reputation that still haunts the place today. Efforts to restore the lake are costing millions.

Put simply, the drive to “act rather than be acted upon” (again, defined strictly as the active form of agency) caused tremendous harm to my local environment.

It’s especially tragic because the damage wasn’t inevitable. Latter-day Satins who trekked here from Nauvoo could have instead fully integrated into the area by working with the landscape and native people rather than colonizing them through subjugation.

Admittedly, this level of integration takes tremendous patience, a painful measure of patience. It’s not limp passivity. It isn’t non-action. It’s wise action, “the art of sailing rather than the art of rowing” as one thinker puts it. It’s a call to work, aligned with nature.

In this way, wise action rejects subconscious subservience to cultural programming and instead sees again and again with beginner’s eyes. Consider, to give one more local example, how Utahns (including myself) adopted standard cultural practices, planting water-intensive lawns and crops in a desert state. If we had instead ignored this cultural programming, which was handed to us by European aristocrats, and listened to our desert landscape, we would have developed sustainable practices decades ago and therefore wouldn’t be in a state-wide water emergency today. As things stand, however, it looks like we’ll have to start the arduous process of collectively replacing our crops and lawns with less water-intensive options, resulting in far more work than if we’d just aligned with our environment from the outset.

And yet, tragically, we’re heading in the opposite direction with the call to build water-sucking,5 electricity-sapping,6 heat-generating7 data centers here. (The footnotes here capture some of the complexity surrounding these issues.) We have to build data centers, the argument goes, or other states will get these contracts! We have to build them or China will leave us behind!

In response to such concerns, we might ask whether we’ll even have the option to live here if we destroy our lakes. It’s a dilemma that’s not strictly hypothetical, as Lake Urmia, once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, has “almost completely dried up” over the past few decades as a result of human action and mismanaged water use. Now the Iranian government is facing the difficult decision of whether to move their nation’s capital from arid Tehran to wetter regions, at an estimated cost of 100 billion dollars. Given these facts, we might cautiously consider whether we can destroy our lakes without suffering similar catastrophic consequences.8

Of course, environmental destruction is not the only reason to be cautious of AI.

We also must consider how these models are trained, who reaps the financial benefits they bring, and how they affect the intellectual and spiritual formation of young people.

I’m haunted by the story of Mophat Okinyi, a Kenyan who was hired as part of a team of moderators paid between one to three dollars an hour to help ChatGPT categorize the most horrific digital content imaginable. Okinyi read and categorized roughly 700 highly explicit passages a day, causing him to slip into a state of paranoia. Months later he returned home from work one day to find a note from his wife saying that she was leaving him. “You’ve changed,” it read. “You’re not the man I married. I don’t understand you anymore.” It seems that the cost of training AI is the uncountable suffering of people like Okinyi.

In addition, AI models have been fed writing, art, and music without the consent of creators. This wouldn’t be such a travesty if everyone collectively shared the financial upside of AI instead of concentrating it in the hands of the few. Unfortunately, it now looks like those who have created content online—recipe bloggers, political commentators, etc.—won’t be fully compensated for their work as users bypass those sources for the AI summaries that pull from those sources. It’s no wonder that when Open AI CEO Sam Altman said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” one commenter responded, “They stole the internet’s knowledge and all the work that went into it and they want to sell it back to us for a fee. What a business model.”

And then there’s the matter of how AI affects intellectual and spiritual formation. At schools across the nation, kids receive Chromebooks fully integrated with Gemini, nudging kids to offload effortful yet valuable mental labor like writing, and allowing them to explore content that’s not appropriate for kids (including semi-explicit romantic roleplay with the chatbot) when they should be doing their homework. None of this is the stuff of healthy formation. As sci-fi author Ted Chiang has said, using AI to write papers is “like bringing a forklift into the weight room.” There’s no muscle gained. No development. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that an MIT study found that “over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” and that 83 percent of those who used LLMs couldn’t later recall the content of a single sentence they “wrote” compared to 11 percent of those who did the work themselves. We also shouldn’t be surprised that the creators of several leading AI models, driven by a hunger for financial gain, have loosened the restrictions around sexually explicit material. For example, even after public outcry, for months Grok allowed users to undress people in photos (including underage people) in its so-called “spicy mode.” The hope there, it seems, is that this titillating content will make the product more addictive, leading to market dominance.

Where does all this leave us?

For my part, I don’t think the answer is to create a hard and fast universal stance against AI or to suggest that if we use it we should do so while feeling sadder and guiltier. AI models are here to stay in some form, and they admittedly have their uses in stem-related fields, where, among many things, researchers are now using them to more effectively pinpoint early onset cancer.9

My position, then, is not a knee-jerk, fear-based reaction against AI but instead a call for wisdom. I’m saying that if we blindly barrel ahead we risk repeating humanity’s needlessly destructive tendencies. We’ll figuratively overfish the lake, strapping our descendants with an enormous burden that could have been avoided if we’d just acted more wisely from the outset.

The truth is that if we’re going to enjoy “deep human connection,” as Cheney calls for, we must admit that agency is active and passive and that both of these elements are essential for building the common good. We must see that machine learning, as impressive and useful as it sometimes is, often carries terrible costs, particularly for the least among us. We must be honest about the way that tech companies with billion-dollar budgets pour their time, money, and effort into a siren’s song that, as the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, aims to make us “distracted from distraction by distraction . . . in this twittering world.”

If we are going to build the City of God we must stop laying the blame primarily on communities that are slow to adapt and start calling out those who use their agency to expand their dominion against the will of others.

We must, above all, recognize that without wisdom, what we call “progress” is, in reality, its opposite—an abandoned tower to nowhere.10

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Jon Ogden is a cofounder at UpliftKids.org, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. Find more of his writing at One Step Enough.

Art by Endre Rozsda (1913–1999).

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GEORGE HANDLEY

If God So Loved the World, Why Shouldn’t We? This breakout session will be devoted to understanding the importance of civic engagement and care for this world in the Restored Gospel. Our objective is to help you understand the benefits and blessings of LDS experience and how they might be extended beyond the walls of church to meet the considerable challenges of our time. You will be invited to find your path to more principled, informed, and civil engagement on issues that confront society today.

JEFF STRONG

Why are so many Latter-day Saints wrestling with faith, belonging, and connection to the Church? In a candid conversation based on research, personal experience, and insights from Torn, we’ll explore what is happening, why it matters, and how we can better understand and support those we love. The conversation will be followed by an extended Q&A.

KATHRYN KNIGHT SONNTAG

The Great Turning: Awakening to the Sacredness of the Earth. As John Philip Newell says, “We live in a threshold moment. We are waking up to the earth again. We are awakening to the feminine and the desire to faithfully tend the interrelationship of all things.” The Great Turning is a term popularized by eco-philosopher Joanna Macy and systems thinker David Korten to describe this threshold—the essential, ongoing global shift from a destructive, extractive Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining, regenerative civilization. It refers to a shifting consciousness, a cultural and spiritual awakening that recognizes human interconnectedness with all of nature. Join me as we reflect on the words of John Philip Newell, write, and share on this threshold moment in which we find ourselves.

JAMES GOLDBERG

Creative Reading, Creative Writing. Religions consistently teach that there is more to things than their surface appearance. In this workshop, we’ll start with an exercise in creative reading, visiting a text to identify multiple layers. We’ll follow that with an exercise in creative writing, visiting an experience to identify multiple layers. These exercises will give participants repeatable techniques for slowing and intensifying their attention.

J.B. HAWS & TYLER JOHNSON

Richard Bushman’s Two Poles: Boston and Salt Lake City. Richard Bushman told his college classmates—on the occasion of their 25th class anniversary—that his life had oscillated between two poles, Boston and Utah. In this session, J.B. Haws and Tyler Johnson will explore Bushman’s dual citizen-type life and his efforts to bridge different worldviews. What might stand out most, with all of the dualities he faced in his life, is the way Bushman has advocated for—and lived out—a kind of integrity that has made him the historian and mentor and disciple that he is.

BRIAN KERSHISNIK

Harvesting from chaos. Almost every religion has a creation mythology where the deity creates everything from chaos. Then we spend our energy trying to fight, avoid, or contain chaos, but apparently that’s where all the good stuff is. The artist Brian Kershisnik will lead a discussion on various life/art practices and methods of observation that help us to dance with, and harvest from, and not be consumed by, chaos.

REBBIE BRASSFIELD & CONOR HILTON

Coming soon to a breakout session near you, a lively, wide-ranging exploration of the intersections of pop culture and Mormonism featuring Rebbie Brassfield and Conor Hilton. Stay tuned for more tantalizing teases of what exactly this dynamic duo has in store for you!

JESIKA HARMON

In this session, Jesika will teach participants how meditation can drastically improve their connection with self, with God, and their Christian discipleship, through guided experience, instruction, and discussion.

HAYMITCH ST. STEPHEN

The Tree of Perception is an immersive, contemplative experience, designed to challenge the way we see, hear, feel, and live. By anchoring awareness on what appears to be a tree of mysterious origins and considering that what we see/hear/feel is not what we thought it was, we can deconstruct our self-centered programs for happiness, open ourselves to wonder, and learn to express beautiful, loving creativity. Jesus repeatedly told his followers to hear, look, or see differently. The Tree of Perception is a space to practice embodying that invitation.

DARLENE YOUNG

Poetry Writing as Archetype: How the Adventure of Writing a Poem Is Like the Adventure of Living in Faith. Committing to the process of creation is a lot like committing to a life of faith. In this section we will examine the creative process as a metaphor for the experience of a life of discipleship when we can’t know all the answers. How does one begin without a clear end in sight? How and why should we strive for authenticity, consider how we frame things, allow for space, and revise ourselves? Together we will walk through the artistic process and “liken” it to a faithful walk through life.

MICHAEL & ERIN ALLEN

Michael and Erin will be facilitating a Christ-centered, holotropic-style breathwork session consisting of deep cyclical breathing with inspiring music. Breath in many traditions and languages – including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek – is synonymous with spirit, wind, energy, and life-force. It is seen as the means not only to regulate the nervous system, but to experience higher states of consciousness, self-realization, and union with the Divine. Participants may experience tingling sensations in the body, processing and releasing of suppressed or repressed mental and emotional blocks, clarity in vision and purpose, and increased spiritual awareness and connection. David O. McKay said, “Meditation is the language of the soul. Meditation is a form of prayer... Meditation is one of the most secret, most sacred doors through which we pass into the presence of the Lord.”

MEGHAN FARNER

The Inner Marriage: Healing Masculine and Feminine Energies for Deeper Spiritual and Relational Connection. What if many of our struggles — spiritually, emotionally, and relationally — stem from ignorance of the deeper laws of creation written into the soul itself? In this collaborative breakout experience, we’ll explore masculine and feminine energy as sacred and eternal forces woven into human transformation. Together, we’ll discuss the eternal law of polarity, healing wounded expressions of these energies, and how polarity influences spiritual growth and partnership. Blending teaching, reflection, and group discussion, this session invites participants into a more whole, grounded, and conscious way of relating to themselves, others, and our Heavenly Parents.

JON OGDEN

Envisioning a Community on Fire. Religious life at times feels dead. Hymns sung half-heartedly, talks without soul, lessons void of verve. How can we collectively and individually spark a living fire inside and outside of traditional structures? What’s working? What’s not working? What new ways of being can we envision? Come share your stories with fellow festival attendees, meet each other, and map a new world together.

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GENERAL SESSION SPEAKERS

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FULL AGENDA

SATURDAY JULY 11TH

• 8:15am Doors Open

• 9:00am Welcome: Rachel Jardine

• 9:10am Musical Performance

• 9:15am Invocation

• 9:20am Poetry Reading: Kathryn Knight Sonntag

• 9:25am Keynote Address: Luke Burgis on Becoming a Person

• 9:50am Conversation: Luke Burgis and Zachary Davis

• 10:10am Story: Mallory Everton

• 10:25am Break

• 11:15am Presentation: Thomas McConkie on Attentional Resilience

• 12:00pm Lunch Break (Catered)

• 1:15pm Breakout Session 1 (choose one)

  • George Handley

  • Kathryn Knight Sonntag

  • Jeff Strong

  • Jesika Harmon

  • Haymitch St. Stephen

  • Darlene Young

  • Rebbie Brassfield & Conor Hilton

• 2:15 Break

• 2:20 Breakout Session 2 (choose one)

  • James Goldberg

  • JB Haws & Tyler Johnson

  • Brian Kershisnik

  • Meghan Farner

  • Michael & Erin Allen

  • Jon Ogden

• 3:20 Break

• 3:35 Musical Performance

• 3:40 Session: Mormon Utopias

  • 3:40pm Elle Griffin

  • 3:50pm Kristine Haglund

  • 4:00pm Conversation and Q&A

• 4:30pm Poetry Reading

• 4:35pm Closing Address: Zachary Davis on a Latter-day Renaissance

• 4:50pm Prayer

• 4:55pm Musical Performance

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DETAILS

WHEN: SATURDAY, JULY 11TH, 2026 (9AM-5PM)

WHERE: UVU Wasatch Campus, 3111 N College Way, Heber City, Utah

TICKET PRICE (INCLUDES CATERED LUNCH):

$95 - General Admission

$45 - Students, adults under 30, and anyone facing financial hardship

$145 - Supporters (help to cover our reduced price tickets!)

If you need more financial support to attend, email us at info@faithmatters.org.

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Please find the original Spanish-language version of this essay here.

This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. (Ephesians 4:17–18, KJV)

There are seasons in which one ceases to feel. One does not cease to believe, at least not entirely, but the chest stops burning. Prayers become monologues; the scriptures, merely a text. What was once presence becomes silence. And in the midst of that silence, a question can arise that few dare to voice aloud: What if what I felt before was not real either?

Many of us who have served a mission know that question, even if we have not always lived it firsthand. We recognize it in the faces of companions with whom we faithfully served, companions with whom we felt that burning in the chest (that sign of which the Lord speaks in Doctrine and Covenants 9:8) and who no longer walk with us. Some drifted away upon discovering something in Church history; others grew angry with a leader; still others simply stopped believing, without visible scandal, without any decisive argument. John records it with a sobriety that stings: “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (John 6:66, KJV).

What happened? What was missing?

I do not presume to answer those questions, at least not directly. What I offer here are thoughts, disordered reflections like those of the seventeenth-century French thinker Blaise Pascal, on how we know God, on what happens when our faculties for knowing him fail, and on why we need both the heart and reason so as not to lose our way.

Blaise Pascal was, first and foremost, a man of science; he was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor of one of the first mechanical calculators—he was one of the sharpest minds of the seventeenth century. But on the night of November ‌‌23, 1654, between half past ten and half past midnight, something happened. Pascal wrote on a piece of paper what he experienced that night and sewed it into the lining of his doublet, where he carried it until he died. No one knew of the paper until it was found on his body. The first line reads: “Fire. ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars.”1 From that night on, Pascal dedicated the remaining years of his life to writing what would become his great apologetic work: the Pensées. He never finished it. What we have are fragments, scattered notes, sketches that his friends compiled after his death in 1662. Despite their unfinished nature, or perhaps precisely because of it, in those pages one can perceive with clarity the depth and perspicacity of his thoughts. They are, above all, an attempt to lead the reader from the concrete reality of the human being, with all its greatness and misery, to an encounter with the living God.

What is clear from reading these fragments is that Pascal did not intend to demonstrate God’s existence through geometric proofs or metaphysical reasoning. His wager is something else: moral arguments that seek to incline the heart, not to convince the intellect, toward God. It is a different approach from what we are accustomed to seeing in Christian apologetics, and it is all the more surprising coming from the seventeenth century. The emphasis Pascal places on the heart2 occupies a central place in his anthropology as that human faculty where feelings, intuitions, and the first principles of knowledge converge. Unlike discursive reason, the heart operates through immediate and affective channels, which makes it a dimension especially vulnerable to external influences. This vulnerability is, in fact, the very reason behind Pascal’s severe warning against the theater: By representing human passions in so natural and convincing a manner, theatrical performance has the power to awaken in the heart feelings that, once awakened, escape the control of reason. For Pascal, even a love represented as chaste and virtuous onstage is dangerous precisely because of its innocence—it disarms the soul before it can defend itself:3

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Heart, instinct, principles.

While I think that the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob”4 (to use his words) must be felt, must be experienced, I sense that rarely—if not almost never—do we arrive at the knowledge or idea of God through the intellect alone but rather after having experienced or felt an external presence, or after being overwhelmed by thoughts that seem to come from outside ourselves. I believe it is only at that point, after feeling, that we employ the intellect. After all, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”5

So on this point, I agree with Pascal that God must be felt, must be experienced, rather than approached with metaphysical puzzles to try to justify our belief, our feeling. It is reason that demonstrates theorems, but it assumes the axioms that the heart gives it:

We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. ‌‌. ‌‌. ‌‌. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways[.] And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them.

But, on the other hand, what happens with those persons whose heart (whose feelings and intuition) is not entirely well? What happens with those who suffer from depression or anxiety, with those who endure some mental illness or live affected by an emotional disorder? Can these persons trust in their feelings or intuition, which depend so much on their heart? How can they know if they are correctly interpreting divine communication? How can they distinguish their own disturbed feelings from what is genuinely divine, especially in their worst moments?

If Pascal distrusts even the theater for its capacity to awaken dangerous passions, one would think that a person with advanced depression could scarcely recognize or interpret their feelings, much less use reason fully. And this raises further questions: Can those who suffer from depression or anxiety still feel God or experience communion with the divine? Certainly, if God so wills, he can dispel and even heal persons in that condition, without any doubt. But what happens in the meantime? Must that person remain in total darkness?

This presents a problem, at least in conventional Christianity, because while God may manifest himself through signs, we can read in the scriptures that his modus operandi is gentler, more still: “And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12). Similar descriptions are given in the New Testament: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23).

So, as I have mentioned, in such cases the heart would be an impediment to holding on to this belief in God, even though we have already seen that the heart lays the foundations on which reason builds. What is to be done if our heart does not function correctly and cannot provide us with those foundations? Can this order be reversed? Can we trust in reason (insofar as possible, since some of these illnesses can cloud judgment)? Is it possible to place our trust in reason so that afterward the heart may corroborate these reasonings? My proposal, modest but firm, is yes, the order can be reversed, reason may sustain the structure while the heart heals, and when the heart returns to its normal function, it will corroborate what reason kept standing.

Pascal seems to propose something similar, although without mentioning mental illness—which is unsurprising, as that concept probably did not exist in his era. Nevertheless, he recognizes that not all of us can arrive at that knowledge and not everyone is granted the gift of knowing through the heart. It would have been interesting to know his complete proposal on whether it is possible for the heart to fail and to see whether he would agree with what I suggest here. “Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced,” he wrote. “But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.”

But this proposal carries a risk. If reason could sustain faith in the absence of the heart, it could also, when poorly employed, impose dogmas that the heart would reject. Pascal himself fell into that trap.

The only criticism I can make of Pascal is that there must be a balance and a mutual cooperation between the role of reason and that of the heart. My current reading of Pascal suggests that he grants primacy to knowledge acquired through the heart and seems to deny reason thereafter, or to actively limit it:

For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.

Pascal renounced reason in favor of mystery, and he set reason against it. This belief in original sin caused much suffering and pain to millions of people (i.e., the condemnation of unbaptized children), and he chose to accept it as mystery. This is the danger when we relegate our reason and accept dogmas. When there is a dissonance between the heart and reason, this should serve as an indicator that something is wrong with one of the two faculties. We must not submit to dogmas without first having achieved a harmony between both.6

Dostoevsky spoke to us about this danger in “The Grand Inquisitor,” contained within his novel The Brothers Karamazov:

We too have a right to preach a mystery, and to teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their hearts, not love that matters, but a mystery which they must follow blindly, even against their conscience. So we have done. We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts.7

If we do not use the heart and reason together, we can become victims of inquisitors.

And here I return to those who have left the Church. How many of them stood before a dogma that their reason rejected and their heart could not sustain? How many asked genuine questions and received as an answer the “authority of the Church”? How many were told that they lacked faith, that they should not doubt, that they should simply obey? How many learned that asking questions was synonymous with apostasy?

But it would be unjust to point only outward. Perhaps we, and perhaps they as well, have failed to give reason to our faith. The heart gave us the foundation, a genuine knowledge, but we did not build on it. And when that knowledge grew dark, nothing remained to sustain us. To build with reason is not to doubt; it is to give foundations to what the heart has given us.

And perhaps, even after having done all this and having built our metaphysical castles, God may come to meet us and tear them down and through the heart teach us that in reality, we know far less than we think we know, that we have made a God in our own likeness. It is one of the essential beliefs of Christianity: We believe in a God who reveals Himself, who makes Himself known to man and allows us to know Him. Hence the word “revelation”: to remove the veil. And at moments when we are allowed to see (to feel with the heart) through that veil, only our human nature prevents us from comprehending it all at once, and we will probably spend a lifetime trying to make sense of what we experience.

And what if we had the opportunity to see beyond the veil or if we beheld some miracle? Think of Julian of Norwich, who received numerous revelations and spent an entire lifetime, as an anchoress, trying to understand those revelations. These experiences of the mystics show us that an element of reason that tries to intervene, to help us translate, to capture something of the divine—something that allows us to hold on to that manifestation, to that knowledge we acquired through the heart.

I believe in a God who has revealed Himself in history and has made Himself known among men, who has become man. I believe that God desires that we all seek communion with Him. I believe it is important to accept revelation, but I also recognize that this revelation, whether given through a prophet or contained in the scriptures, is not exempt from error. The men who have written and prophesied are as human as we are: They have had fears, desires, and interests, and they have been victims of their era, their time, and their culture.

Those of us who have received our faith through the testimony of others should exercise reason while seeking that direct experience with the divine that can speak to our hearts. And if we have not had such an experience, we must use reason with even greater rigor. If we begin from the principle that God has given us reason, it is reasonable (if you will forgive the redundancy) to think that God expects us to use it. History has shown us, painfully, what happens when faith is left unexamined—when entire communities accept as divine mandate what reason would have exposed as human prejudice.

I believe that revelation is iterative, that God gives it to us little by little because we cannot withstand its fullness all at once. If even now it seems to bother some that God is love and that His message is so inclusive and broad,8 how much more difficult would it be if He gave us all His fullness at once. By iterative, I mean that it can be corrected along the way. I believe that at times even the prophets may have misinterpreted their experiences and needed correction. That is why I say iterative, not merely additive.9 Nor am I against organized religion, for other broad reasons that exceed the purpose of this reflection. Suffice it to say that we can believe in organized religion as well as in God’s individual communication with us, so long as we remain open to the heart and submit what God gives us to reason, doing the best we can.

I think again of those who have left. Perhaps what was missing, for them and maybe for us as well, was learning that the heart and reason are not enemies but companions on the road.10 That to doubt is not to lose faith, but to give it a foundation. That to question is not to apostatize, but to honor the reason that God gave us. After all, Pascal spent an entire night in fire, and he devoted the rest of his life to thinking and writing his incomplete apologia. And perhaps it is fitting that it remained incomplete, for no single generation can exhaust that labor on its own. Future generations will have the duty not to perpetuate and engrave in stone our beliefs or dogmas but to correct them in the light of new revelation. This will allow us to unveil God ever more, until we no longer see “through a glass, darkly,” but rather we will see “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

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Javier Fuentes Mora is a computer systems engineer with studies in Catholic theology and a master’s in Philosophy, Culture, and Religion. He is passionate about theology and runs a YouTube channel discussing faith, history, and philosophy from a Latter-day Saint perspective.

Art by Georges de La Tour (1593–1692).

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Please find the English-language translation of this essay here.

Esto, pues, digo y testifico en el Señor, que no andéis más como los otros gentiles, que andan en la vanidad de su mente, teniendo el entendimiento entenebrecido, ajenos de la vida de Dios por la ignorancia que en ellos hay, por la dureza de su corazón. (Efesios 4:17-18)

Hay temporadas en las que uno deja de sentir. No se deja de creer, al menos no del todo, pero el pecho deja de arder. Las oraciones se vuelven monólogo; las escrituras solo un texto. Lo que antes era presencia se convierte en silencio. Y en medio de ese silencio puede surgir una pregunta que pocos se atreven a decir en voz alta: ¿y si lo que sentí antes tampoco era real?

Muchos de nosotros que hemos servido una misión conocemos esa pregunta, aunque no siempre la hayamos vivido en carne propia. La reconocemos en los rostros de compañeros con quienes fielmente servimos y con quienes sentimos arder el pecho, esa señal de la que habla el Señor en Doctrina y Convenios 9:8, y que hoy ya no caminan con nosotros. Algunos se alejaron al descubrir algo de la historia de la Iglesia; otros se enojaron con algún líder; otros simplemente dejaron de creer, sin escándalo visible, sin argumento decisivo. Juan lo registra con una sobriedad que duele: “Desde entonces, muchos de sus discípulos volvieron atrás y ya no andaban con él” (Juan 6:66).

¿Qué ocurrió? ¿Qué faltó?

No pretendo responder esas preguntas, al menos no directamente. Lo que ofrezco aquí son pensamientos, reflexiones desordenadas, como las del pensador francés del siglo XVII Blaise Pascal, sobre cómo conocemos a Dios, sobre qué pasa cuando nuestras facultades para conocerlo fallan, y sobre por qué necesitamos tanto del corazón como de la razón para no perdernos en el camino.

Blaise Pascal fue, antes que nada, un hombre de ciencia. Matemático, físico, inventor de una de las primeras calculadoras mecánicas, uno de los espíritus más agudos del siglo XVII. Pero el 23 de noviembre de 1654, entre las diez y media de la noche y las doce y media de la madrugada, algo sucedió. Pascal escribió en un papel lo que experimentó esa noche y lo cosió al forro de su jubón, donde lo cargó hasta morir. Nadie supo del papel hasta que lo encontraron en su cuerpo. La primera línea dice: “Fuego. Dios de Abraham, Dios de Isaac, Dios de Jacob, no el de los filósofos y los sabios.”1 Desde esa noche, Pascal dedicó los años que le quedaban a escribir lo que sería su gran obra apologética: los Pensamientos. Nunca la terminó. Lo que tenemos son fragmentos, notas dispersas, bocetos que sus amigos compilaron después de su muerte en 1662. A pesar de su naturaleza inacabada, o quizás precisamente por ella, en esas páginas es posible percibir con claridad la profundidad y perspicacia de su pensamiento. Son, ante todo, un intento de conducir al lector desde la realidad concreta del ser humano, con toda su grandeza y su miseria, hasta el encuentro con el Dios vivo.

Lo que queda claro al leer estos fragmentos es que Pascal no pretendía demostrar a Dios mediante pruebas geométricas ni razonamientos metafísicos. Su apuesta es otra: argumentos morales que buscan inclinar el corazón, no convencer al intelecto, hacia Dios. Es un enfoque distinto al que estamos acostumbrados en la apologética cristiana, y aún más sorprendente viniendo del siglo XVII. El énfasis que Pascal le da al corazón2 ocupa un lugar central en su antropología como esa facultad humana donde convergen sentimientos, intuiciones y los primeros principios del conocimiento. A diferencia de la razón discursiva, el corazón opera por vías inmediatas y afectivas, lo que lo convierte en una dimensión especialmente vulnerable a influencias externas. Es, de hecho, precisamente esta vulnerabilidad la razón detrás de la severa advertencia de Pascal contra el teatro: al representar las pasiones humanas de forma tan natural y convincente, el teatro tiene el poder de despertar en el corazón sentimientos que, una vez despertados, escapan al control de la razón. Para Pascal, incluso un amor representado como casto y virtuoso en el escenario es peligroso precisamente por su inocencia—desarma el alma antes de que pueda defenderse3:

El corazón siente a Dios, no la razón. En esto consiste la fe: Dios sensible al corazón, no a la razón.

El corazón tiene sus razones, que la razón no conoce;

Corazón, instinto, principios.

Si bien pienso que el Dios de Abraham, de Isaac, y de Jacob (usando sus palabras) debe sentirse, debe experimentarse, creo que pocas veces—si no es que casi nunca—llegamos al conocimiento o a la idea de Dios solo a través del intelecto, sino después de haber experimentado; de haber sentido una presencia externa, o de ser abrumados por pensamientos que parecen venir de fuera de nosotros. Creo que es hasta ese punto, después de sentir, cuando usamos el intelecto; después de todo “La razón es, y sólo debe ser, esclava de las pasiones, y no puede pretender otro oficio que el de servirlas y obedecerlas.” Así que en este punto estoy de acuerdo con Pascal en que Dios debe sentirse, de experimentarse, más que solo crearnos acertijos metafísicos para tratar de justificar nuestra creencia, nuestro sentimiento, es la razón la que demuestra teoremas, pero asume los axiomas que el corazón le da:

Conocemos la verdad no sólo por la razón, sino también por el corazón; de esta segunda manera conocemos los primeros principios, y en vano el razonamiento, que no participa en ella, trata de combatirlos. . . . Los principios se sienten, las proporciones se infieren; y todo esto con certeza, aunque por vías diferentes. Y es tan inútil y tan ridículo que la razón exija al corazón pruebas de sus principios para querer consentir en ellos, como sería ridículo que el corazón exigiera a la razón un sentimiento de todas las proposiciones que ella demuestra para querer aceptarlas.

Pero, por otro lado, ¿qué ocurre con aquellas personas cuyo corazón (cuyos sentimientos e intuición) no está del todo bien? ¿Qué sucede con quienes sufren depresión o ansiedad, con quienes padecen alguna enfermedad mental o viven afectados por un trastorno emocional? ¿Pueden estas personas confiar en sus sentimientos o intuición que tanto dependen de su corazón? ¿Cómo saber si están interpretando correctamente la comunicación divina? ¿Cómo distinguir sus propios sentimientos perturbados de lo que es genuinamente divino, especialmente en los peores momentos?

Si Pascal desconfía incluso del teatro por su capacidad de despertar pasiones peligrosas, habría que pensar que una persona con depresión avanzada difícilmente puede reconocer o interpretar sus sentimientos, mucho menos usar la razón completamente. Y esto plantea más interrogantes: ¿Pueden quienes sufren depresión o ansiedad aún sentir a Dios o experimentar comunión con lo divino? Ciertamente, si Dios así lo desea, puede disipar e incluso sanar a personas en esa condición, sin duda alguna. Pero ¿qué sucede en el ínterin? ¿Esa persona debe de permanecer en oscuridad total?

Esto representa un problema, al menos en el cristianismo convencional, pues si bien Dios se puede llegar a manifestar por medio de señales, podemos leer en las escrituras que su modus operandi es más suave, más apacible:

Y él le dijo: Sal fuera, y ponte en el monte delante de Jehová. Y he aquí que Jehová pasaba, y un grande y poderoso viento rompía los montes y quebraba las peñas delante de Jehová, pero Jehová no estaba en el viento. Y tras el viento, un terremoto, pero Jehová no estaba en el terremoto. Y tras el terremoto, un fuego, pero Jehová no estaba en el fuego. Y tras el fuego, una voz apacible y delicada. (1 Reyes 19:11-12)

Descripciones similares aparecen en el Nuevo Testamento: “Pero el fruto del Espíritu es: amor, gozo, paz, longanimidad, benignidad, bondad, fe, mansedumbre, templanza; contra tales cosas no hay ley” (Gálatas 5:22-23).

Entonces como he mencionado en semejantes casos, el “corazón” sería un impedimento para aferrarse a esta creencia en Dios, aunque ya vimos que el corazón pone los fundamentos sobre los cuales la razón edifica. ¿Qué hacer si nuestro corazón no funciona correctamente y no nos puede proveer de esos fundamentos? ¿Se puede invertir este orden? ¿Confiar en la razón (en la medida de lo posible, ya que algunas de estas enfermedades pueden nublar el juicio)? ¿Es posible colocar nuestra confianza en la razón para que después el corazón corrobore estos razonamientos? Mi propuesta, modesta pero firme, es que sí: que el orden puede invertirse, que la razón sostenga la estructura mientras el corazón sana, y que cuando este vuelva a funcionar, corrobore lo que la razón mantuvo en pie.

Pascal parece proponer algo similar, aunque sin mencionar las enfermedades mentales, lo cual no es de sorprender, pues probablemente dicho concepto no existía en su época. Sin embargo, reconoce que no todos podemos llegar a ese conocimiento o que no a todos se nos concede ese don de conocer por medio del corazón. Hubiera sido interesante conocer su propuesta completa considerando si es posible que el “corazón” falle y ver si estaría de acuerdo con lo que aquí sugiero:

Por lo cual, aquellos a los que Dios ha concedido la religión por sentimiento del corazón son bienaventurados y están muy legítimamente persuadidos. Pero a aquellos que no la tienen, no (se) la podemos dar sino por razonamiento, en la espera de que Dios se la dé por sentimiento de corazón, sin lo cual la fe no es más que humana, e inútil para la salvación.

Pero esta propuesta trae consigo un riesgo. Si la razón puede sostener la fe en ausencia del corazón, también puede, mal empleada, imponer dogmas que el corazón rechazaría. Pascal mismo cayó en esa trampa.

La única crítica que le puedo hacer a Pascal es que debe haber un equilibrio y una mutua cooperación entre el papel de la razón y el del corazón. Al menos en mi lectura actual, me parece que Pascal da primacía a un conocimiento adquirido por medio del corazón y parece negar la razón en adelante o limitarla de manera activa:

Pues, nada, sin duda, hiere más nuestra razón que decir que el pecado del primer hombre haya tornado culpables a quienes, por estar tan lejos de esa fuente, parecen incapaces de participar en él. Tal deslizamiento no sólo nos parece imposible, sino también muy injusto; en efecto, ¿hay algo más contrario a las reglas de nuestra miserable justicia que condenar eternamente a un niño, incapaz de voluntad a causa de un pecado en el que parece participar tan poco, que ha sido cometido seis mil años antes de su nacimiento? Ciertamente, no hay nada que nos choque más que esa doctrina; y sin embargo, sin ese misterio, el más incomprensible de todos, somos incomprensibles para nosotros mismos.4

Pascal renunció a la razón en favor del misterio, y contrapuso la razón al mismo. Esta creencia en el pecado original, que causó mucho sufrimiento y dolor a millones de personas (la condenación de niños sin bautismo), él la aceptó como misterio. Este es el peligro cuando relegamos nuestra razón y aceptamos “dogmas.” Cuando existe una disonancia entre el corazón y la razón, esto debe de servir como indicador de que algo no está bien con alguna de las dos facultades. No debemos someternos a dogmas sin haber logrado primero una armonía entre ambas.5

Sobre este peligro ya nos habló Dostoievski en “El gran inquisidor” situado dentro de su novela Los hermanos Karamazov:

Y nosotros tenemos derecho a predicarles a los hombres que deben someterse a él sin razonar, aun contra los dictados de su conciencia. Y eso es lo que hemos hecho. Hemos corregido tu obra; la hemos basado en el “milagro,” el “misterio,” y la “autoridad.” Y los hombres se han congratulado de verse de nuevo conducidos como un rebaño y libres, por fin, del don funesto que tantos sufrimientos les ha causado.6

Si no usamos en conjunto el corazón y la razón, podemos ser víctimas de inquisidores.

Y aquí vuelvo a los que se fueron de la Iglesia. ¿Cuántos de ellos se encontraron frente a un dogma que su razón rechazaba y su corazón no podía sostener? ¿Cuántos se hicieron preguntas genuinas y recibieron como respuesta la “autoridad” de la Iglesia? ¿A cuántos se les dijo que les faltaba fe, que no dudaran, que simplemente obedecieran? ¿Cuántos aprendieron que preguntar era sinónimo de apostatar?

Pero sería injusto señalar solo hacia afuera. Quizás nosotros, y quizás también ellos, hemos fracasado en darle una razón a nuestra fe. El corazón nos dio los fundamentos, un conocimiento genuino, pero no edificamos sobre ellos. Y cuando ese conocimiento se oscureció, no quedó nada que nos sostuviera. Construir con la razón no es dudar; es darle cimientos a lo que el corazón nos ha dado.

Y aun así, aun después de haber hecho todo esto y de haber edificado nuestros castillos metafísicos, puede que Dios nos salga al encuentro y los derrumbe, y por medio del corazón nos enseñe que en realidad desconocemos más de lo que creemos saber, que nos hemos hecho un Dios a nuestra semejanza. Es una de las creencias esenciales del cristianismo: creemos en un Dios que se autorrevela, que se da a conocer al hombre y que nos permite conocerle. De ahí la palabra revelación: remover el velo. Y por momentos se nos deja ver (sentir con el corazón) a través de dicho velo, solo que nuestra naturaleza humana nos impide comprenderlo todo a la vez, y probablemente pasemos una vida tratando de darle sentido a lo que experimentamos.

¿Y si tuvimos la oportunidad de ver más allá del velo o si contemplamos algún milagro? Pensemos en Juliana de Norwich, quien recibió numerosas revelaciones y pasó toda una vida, como anacoreta, tratando de comprender dichas revelaciones. Estas experiencias de los místicos nos muestran que hay un elemento de razón que trata de intervenir para ayudarnos a traducir, a capturar algo de la divinidad, algo que nos permita aferrarnos a esa manifestación, a ese conocimiento que adquirimos mediante el corazón.

Creo en un Dios que se ha revelado en la historia y se ha dado a conocer entre los hombres, que se ha hecho hombre. Creo que Dios desea que todos busquemos comunión con Él. Creo que es importante aceptar la revelación, pero también reconozco que esta revelación, ya sea dada por un profeta o contenida en las escrituras, no está exenta de error. Los hombres que escribieron y profetizaron eran tan humanos como nosotros: tenían miedos, deseos, intereses, y fueron víctimas de su época, su tiempo y su cultura.

Aquellos que hemos recibido nuestra fe por el testimonio de otros deberíamos siempre ejercitar la razón mientras buscamos esa experiencia directa con lo divino que pueda hablarnos al corazón. Y si no hemos tenido tal experiencia, debemos usar la razón con mayor rigor todavía. Si partimos del principio de que Dios nos ha dado la razón, es razonable (valga la redundancia) pensar que Dios espera que la usemos. La historia nos lo ha mostrado, dolorosamente, cuando comunidades enteras aceptan como mandato divino lo que la razón habría desenmascarado como prejuicio humano.

Creo que la revelación es iterativa, que Dios nos la va dando poco a poco porque no podemos resistir su plenitud de una sola vez. Si incluso ahora parece que a algunos les molesta que Dios sea amor y que su mensaje sea tan inclusivo y amplio,7 cuánto más difícil sería de sobrellevar si nos diese toda su plenitud de golpe. Al decir iterativa, me refiero a que puede irse corrigiendo. Creo que a veces incluso los profetas pueden haber interpretado mal sus experiencias y necesitar corrección. Por ello digo iterativa, no solo aditiva.8 Tampoco estoy en contra de la religión organizada, por otras razones amplias que exceden el propósito de esta reflexión. Basta decir que podemos creer tanto en la religión organizada como en la comunicación individual de Dios con nosotros, siempre y cuando estemos abiertos al corazón y sometamos lo que Dios nos da a la razón, haciendo lo mejor que podamos.

Pienso de nuevo en los que se fueron. Quizás lo que faltó, para ellos y quizás también para nosotros, fue aprender que el corazón y la razón no son enemigos, sino compañeros de camino.9 Que dudar no es perder la fe, sino darle cimientos. Que preguntar no es apostatar, sino honrar la razón que Dios nos dio. Después de todo, Pascal pasó una noche entera en fuego, y dedicó el resto de su vida a pensar y escribir esta apología incompleta. Y quizás es propio que haya quedado incompleta, pues ninguna generación puede agotar esa labor por sí misma. Las generaciones futuras tendrán el deber no de perpetuar y grabar en piedra nuestras creencias o dogmas, sino de corregirlas a la luz de nueva revelación. Esto nos permitirá ir develando a Dios cada vez más, hasta que ya no veamos “por espejo, oscuramente,” más veremos “cara a cara” (1 Corintios 13:12).

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Javier Fuentes Mora es ingeniero en Sistemas Computacionales, con estudios en teología católica y una maestría en Filosofía, Cultura y Religión. Apasionado por la teología, dirige un canal de YouTube donde explora temas de fe, historia y filosofía desde una perspectiva de los Santos de los Últimos Días.

Art by Georges de La Tour (1593-1692).

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In July 1847, under the yoke of a piercingly dry summer heat, a company of Mormon pioneers breached the Wasatch Mountains. In crossing this final hurdle, the group had finally reached the destination toward which they had been devoutly marching for the last four months. Orson Pratt, one of the scouts leading the company, recounted the first moments that the Salt Lake Valley came into view, writing that he “could not refrain from a shout of joy, which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips the moment this grand and lovely scenery was within our view.”

Brigham Young had led the group to the area based on rumors of the valley’s fertile land. He believed it would be a place where he could plant the Church and watch it grow. When they arrived, Young and company were not disappointed. The valley exceeded all expectations; it was full of grass and streams and what felt like the light of God shining down on it.1

These sights came after years of struggle as an organization. The Saints had scavenged for food from Palmyra to Utah, had buried their loved ones on the sides of wagon trails, and had been chased out of every place they tried to settle. Contrast that pain with the relief that those early scouts must have felt swarming across that valley. Every bit of green from the white-tipped wild buckwheat to the rough bark of pinyon pine was a promise from the Earth of a bountiful future. The relief must have flown heavy through their veins, pulling them down into the dirt to rest. They had made it.

But their time to rest was short. The first company arrived with the summer firmly on the wane, and the largest influx of pioneers wouldn’t arrive until fall’s wan tendrils had come to choke out the summer’s color. With what little time was left in the year, the Saints got to work. They planted what they could and scrounged what little was available. Reports note that those early arrivers survived on crow and wolf meat, weeds like thistle tops and lily bulbs, and when they got desperate enough, tree bark.2 This spartan diet was supplemented with dreams of a full harvest in the coming year.

The Saints spent the winter preparing and fencing off more than five thousand acres of land for agricultural purposes. And when spring came, the fields were sown with an array of staple crops: buckwheat, corn, beans, peas, and more. Everything that would make this strange new valley a little more like home.

As the temperatures rose in early 1848, so too did the crops. On April 16, one settler wrote that “green stuff is coming very fast” and that the crops were “looking grand.” Finally, their wandering in the wilderness seemed to be at its end. But even the best-laid plans of pioneers and parishioners often go awry.

May brought with it a plague of Mosaic proportions. Without warning, swarms of crickets poured across the valley. Mrs. Lorenzo Dow Young wrote of the crickets: “Today to our utter astonishment, the crickets came by millions, sweeping everything before them. They first attacked a patch of beans for us and in twenty minutes there was not a vestige of them to be seen. They next swept over peas, then came into our garden; took everything clean. We went out with brush and undertook to drive them, but they were too strong for us.” The forward march of the cricket army caused nothing less than devastation.

The Saints used every tactic they could think of to try to stop the crickets. They smashed them, stomped them, burned them, and drowned them. They tried feeding the dead crickets to the live ones. They even resorted to the psychic warfare of loud noises and dance in an effort to scare the bugs away. Nevertheless, the insect horde marched forward.

The crickets, of course, destroyed the pioneers’ crops, but their assault was more insidious than that. Those who had spent their winter tending to the earth and expecting a bountiful harvest began to doubt what had brought them here. They murmured that perhaps Brigham Young, who had only recently won the power struggle for control of the Church, might have been wrong to lead the Saints to the valley. Some began to murmur that they ought to abandon Zion for a comfortable life in the settlements of California. The threat of a mass exodus from this fledgling colony was existential to the whole Mormon experiment.

But, the story goes, the Lord would not permit the restoration of his gospel to be upset. And as if on some divine cue, thousands of California gulls arrived. One diarist wrote: “Their coming was like a great cloud; and when they passed between us and the sun, a shadow covered the field. I could see gulls settling for more than a mile around us.”

The clouds of birds must have shocked the already fragile bunch. But any fear the Saints harbored quickly dissipated as they watched the gulls begin a full-on offensive against the crickets. The gulls would land in the fields and gorge on the insects, snapping up beakfuls at a time and swallowing them whole. And when the gulls were full, they would flap over to the nearest ditch and wash their insect meal down with water. After a brief rest, the gulls would regurgitate cricket pellets and start the process all over again. More greedy feeding. More water. More pellets spat out in the field. And repeat. The birds brought hope that the plague would pass, and eventually it did.

This story has been passed down in Utah and among the broader Mormon community for generations. We’ve raised a monument to it, and we’ve repeated the story during family home evenings, in Sunday School classes, and over the pulpit. And the facts, which more or less make it into these recitations, underline one clear point: The gulls were a miracle from God.

In the early months of 2019, I stood, in the style of Orson Pratt, on the precipice of the rest of my life. Just months before this inflection point, I had begun my first year of law school, I had proposed to my girlfriend, and I had bought into the idea of a career path that a smooth-talking upperclassman had pitched me on. At this point, I had already matriculated into law school, and I had known for some time that I would marry my then-fiancée, so it was the final career piece that felt like cresting the hill of change.

Just after receiving my rather middling grades for the first semester, the upperclassman explained how he was able to land a job at a top law firm despite grades that were comparable to mine. It all started with his first summer of law school. During that summer, he signed up for an underutilized program that was available at BYU’s law school. The school called it “International by Request.” The program was sponsored and run by one of the Church’s associate general counsels. This particular Church employee cared deeply about mentoring, and so he used the Church’s connections to law firms across the globe to get BYU students unpaid internships in law firms outside of the United States.

Not many students had taken advantage of this program because it required the student to pay their way to another country where the student would spend their summer providing free labor to a foreign law firm. There was no guarantee as to what type of work the student would do or even which country a student would find themselves assigned to. But the upperclassman had run the numbers. He realized that because the Church tends to hire well-respected firms, students had a decent chance of being placed in a foreign satellite office of one of several elite US-based law firms. He also figured out how to craft an application that increased his likelihood of being placed in such a firm, and that’s just what he did. He was ultimately placed in the Barcelona satellite office of a US firm that he turned into a stateside return offer. The program, he explained, was like a career hack. Someone with middling grades, like I had, could still land in an elite law firm with a sickeningly high starting salary.

The catch to this program, beyond the lack of pay and the uncertainty of where you might be assigned, was that you had to guarantee that you would accept whatever offer you were matched with. The program operated on goodwill, and BYU made its students sign an agreement that they wouldn’t embarrass the general counsel by reneging if a better offer came along later. This catch was offset by the guarantee that you would be placed somewhere. You could rest assured that your resume for your first summer of law school wouldn’t be left blank. With the guarantee of a job and based on the upperclassman’s advice, I rolled the dice and applied. I was on the precipice of the rest of my life. I looked down at the valley below me—a wedding with the woman I loved, a path forward to financially care for the family I was building, and a foreign adventure that would help me get there. I wanted to shout for joy at the grand and lovely scenery that was within my view.

I was raised in the Church, and I grew up with a cosmology that bounces from one miracle to the next. First, God said let there be light, and he spent the next several millennia demonstrating his power to the people of Earth. Man is created and cast out of paradise. Noah is commanded to build an ark just before the whole world is flooded. With Moses, the sticks turn to snakes and the waters part. Elijah promises a widow that her barrel of meal and cruse of oil will be replenished. Elisha summons she-bears to attack the children that persecuted him.

Skip forward, and God sends his Only Begotten Son to the world. Christ saves a wedding by turning water to wine. He feeds the masses with just a few loaves of bread and fishes. He heals the sick and raises Lazarus. Christ himself rises from the dead. Peter then takes up the healer’s mantle. Saul’s vision is restored. Not to mention all the Book of Mormon miracles that occur a world away on this same timeline.

We Mormons tend to skip forward to Palmyra in the early 1820s when young Joseph Smith saw God and Christ in the flesh. He translated golden plates from an ancient language into English. Angels restored first the Aaronic and then the Melchizedek Priesthoods. Joseph Smith is killed and succeeded by Brigham Young, who proves his rightful succession by speaking in the voice of Joseph. Brigham leads the Saints across the plains, and the Saints are saved by a flock of gulls. All of this was foundational in allowing Christ’s restored gospel to spread across the globe. Every step, a miracle.

As faith-promoting as these stories of miracles can be, they also beg some complicated questions for a twenty-first-century church. Church leadership teaches that miracles still occur, and many believers would testify that they have experienced one. But the types of miracles that are discussed today are of a different kind than those recorded in scripture. They are stories of triumph over disease, mental clarity in an increasingly chaotic world, and gifts of kindness arriving just when they’re needed the most. These modern-day miracles can fulfill a similar faith-promoting role as those recorded in scripture, but they diverge from the scriptural miracles in that they carry with them an implicit plausible deniability.

Consider, for a moment, Moses. If we could verify his parting of the Red Sea, such an action would still be totally unexplainable by any modern theories of the universe. It would show a break in our knowledge and would point to the divine. Compare that to a Saint’s miraculous recovery from lung cancer. When the Saint is diagnosed, they’re told that if they work together with their medical team, they should have about a 20 percent chance of survival. If that person is later declared cancer-free, it may feel like a miracle to that person, and it may be. But an outsider, or even a questioning survivor, might attribute that survival to medicine, the biological function of a human body, or even just dumb luck. It was, after all, a one-in-five chance to begin with.

None of this is to say which view is right. I often find myself swinging back and forth between skepticism in this age of science and recognizing God’s hand in all things. But this tension deserves some consideration. For many, the lack of grand scriptural miracles in the modern day is itself proof that those old stories are nothing more than myth. If those miracles are just myths, what language—what reason—is there for the synchronicities that we experience today? That line of thinking, when taken to its logical conclusion, leaves us stranded in a world of chaos, without any hope that the divine might intercede on our behalf.

When the gulls arrived in 1848, they did not bring the Saints total relief. Even after the gulls arrived, the crickets were still innumerable and continued their sustained campaign against the farmers. Thus, despite the arrival of the gulls, the 1848 harvest was relatively poor. The Saints survived, but contrary to their expectations, they spent another year hungry.

The failure of the gulls to “save” the crops, coupled with a modern understanding of local ecology, calls into question the miraculous nature of the birds’ arrival. While the appearance of ocean birds to a landlocked place like Utah was strange to those early settlers, the gulls were not new to the area. Written accounts of gulls—and of crickets—in the Great Basin predate the Mormon arrival in the area by several years. It’s not as if either species arrived to the area for the sole purpose of afflicting or saving the Saints. Moreover, flocks of gulls have followed swarms of crickets into several Western US communities since that 1848 incident. Similar events have occurred in North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, and Oregon. Where the crickets go, so do the gulls.

Additionally, the strange behavior of the gulls, the cycle of eating and regurgitating and eating again, has a biological explanation. Gulls can’t digest the hard exoskeleton of the crickets and will habitually regurgitate the indigestible portions. This makes room for more calories and nutrients. So, the gulls were presumably sating their hunger rather than purposely bingeing and purging for the benefit of the pioneers.

Finally, a proper historical understanding of the appearance of the gulls in 1848 must recognize that some contemporary records credit the work of humans to push back the crickets as a coequal reason for the Saints’ ability to salvage some of their harvest. Brigham Young himself acknowledged this when he wrote that “the crickets are still quite numerous and busy eating, but between the gulls and our own efforts and the growth of our crops we shall raise much grain in spite of them.”

In other words, there are logical explanations for each of the main points of the story of the gulls—the birds’ appearance, their behavior, and the Saints’ survival. Nothing in the story is unexplainable. It all could have happened at any point in the history of the Great Basin.

But it didn’t happen at any point in history. There is still the coincidence of it occurring during that first year of Mormon settlement. As natural as the gulls may have been, their arrival cannot be fully separated from the human context that they unwittingly landed in. The Saints had taken their faith to the edge of the empire and had abandoned known civilization under the leadership of a man whose succession was far from certain. The crickets arrived and tested their faith in Brother Brigham, and the gulls affirmed that the Saints’ faith was well placed. As a result, none of them fled the fledgling settlement for California. Those extra hands helped to build a community in the high desert; they helped erect the Salt Lake City temple; they laid the foundation for much of Utah history. The crickets were the first major test of faith in the valley, the gulls the answer. A miracle for those who needed it.

The closing months of my second semester were stressful. Time kept passing, and I still hadn’t received my summer placement. I didn’t know which country I would be sent to, nor how expensive it might be to get last-minute tickets and accommodation. This stress compounded with the mini skirmishes that can accompany wedding planning when operating on a shoestring budget. But my faith remained steadfast that a bright future sat just on the other side of finals. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I’d courted a lovely young lady and then asked her to be my wife. I’d taken my education seriously. And I’d followed the advice of someone whose career path I wanted to emulate. I believed that all things would work together for my good.

But spring came, and the tapestry of the future that I’d spent months weaving in my mind began to unravel. First, an email came letting me know that the Church’s associate general counsel was unable to place me with any foreign law firms. The so-called guaranteed placement had fallen through, and I was left with just a couple of weeks to scramble to find a summer job. The career services office was of limited help, as most jobs had been filled while I was honoring my commitment not to apply for any other roles. I felt like I was on my own to salvage my career before it had even begun.

Worse yet, the arguments over wedding planning escalated in the days leading up to the event. The reasons are nuanced and not the subject of this essay, but these arguments isolated me within my own relationship. This isolation ate through my last days as a bachelor, and with just hours remaining until I was set to make an eternal commitment to another, I was fighting off the pallid tendrils of doubt.

On the day of my sealing, I arrived at the temple early and filled with hope despite the setback of the preceding days. But in coming face-to-face with my soon-to-be spouse, I felt that what divided us was still unrepaired. We moved forward with the ceremony, but not even the sealing power of God could bridge the cavern that lay between us.

I hovered through the rest of my wedding day like a ghost unable to give or receive warmth as I wandered through rooms full of loved ones. I tried to play my part, but really I felt detached and sick. At the reception that night, I sat down to our catered dinner. As soon as I put it down, I excused myself to the bathroom where I threw it back up.

The distance between us remained even as we packed our bags for our honeymoon. It felt like going through the motions. We’d booked the trip; therefore, we must go. When we did reach our destination, the trip quickly devolved into us spending time apart. Only threads of a shared pain and talk of divorce kept us loosely stitched together. I wasn’t sleeping, and I wasn’t eating. The vision of my future was threadbare, empty, gray.

When the honeymoon was over, my wife and I spent the following weeks separating, trying to reconcile, and separating again. Our relationship never really improved, but I did find a job with a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was chambered in Pocatello, Idaho, just an hour from the town where my family lived. My wife did not join me there. Instead, she stayed with her family in California. I drove down to see her. I called her every night. I started therapy, and I invited her to join me in couples counseling. I wanted so badly for this to work. But three months and one day from our wedding, we filed for divorce. This was the existential threat of the summer. Could I keep moving through life without the woman with whom I had made an eternal commitment?

Like the arrival of the crickets and the gulls that kept the Saints from fleeing to San Francisco, the associate general counsel’s inability to place me in a foreign law office bound me geographically to the place where I needed to be. I had planned on spending my first summer of law school in another country with my new wife. Instead, I found myself spending that summer walking from a bare basement apartment on the outskirts of Idaho State University to a quiet courthouse next to a freeway. The work was interesting and challenging, but I had never given even a thought during the previous year to working in Idaho. It was never part of my plan.

And yet, when the reality of my divorce set in, when I started spending nights hunched over a toilet bowl, when I found myself in the ER at 4:00 a.m. due to some unknown pain that I struggled to describe, my family was always nearby. In the midst of my anguish, there was relief that I wouldn’t have experienced had my summer plans panned out. Looking back, I don’t think I would have survived the summer if I had been living in an unfamiliar country with no support network. In that way, being the first and only person in the history of BYU’s guaranteed placement program to not receive a placement felt like a miracle.

Like the story of the gulls, there are several reasonable explanations for how I ended up in Pocatello that summer. First, and perhaps most important, is that the upperclassman who pitched me on the international match program had been evangelizing it throughout the law school. As a result, a record number of students signed up for the program that year, and the sheer volume of students overwhelmed the system. I also suspect that students were being placed in order of our last names because the last person to be placed was a friend whose surname started with an “Sc,” just before mine alphabetically. I was just the unlucky end of the list.

There’s also an explanation for why a federal judge still had room for me in his chambers so close to the summer and so late in the application cycle. The judge was a BYU graduate, and every year he held open a spot for a BYU Law student. This opening was supposed to be advertised by BYU’s career services office, but that year the office had undergone some major personnel changes. With those changes, my class was never made aware of the judge’s long-standing offer. When I finally reached out to the judge’s chambers, I was immediately offered the spot that was supposed to have been filled several months earlier.

“Memory fixates on times of intense passage, but also mythologizes them.” That’s why it’s important to step back and look at the situation objectively. In doing so, I’m left with an explanation for every crack that I fell through, for every misstep that caused me to stumble into a courthouse just down the road from my family. There was nothing fundamentally magic about how I ended up where I did that summer. In that way, maybe this was all bound to happen to someone at some point. But it didn’t just happen to someone. It happened to me. It happened right as I was on the cusp of deciding, at least in broad strokes, what the rest of my life would look like. It happened just ahead of the lowest point of my life. Being on the receiving end of so many unlikely though explainable coincidences makes me feel strangely connected to those pioneers who looked into the face of uncertainty and remained resolute. Like them, there was a miracle when I needed it. A miracle, it seems.

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Dominic Shaw is an attorney living in Virginia with his wife and their two cats. His writing has previously been published in Inscape Journal and Brigham Young University Law Review.

Art by John James Audubon (1785–1851).

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As a woman who had to wait much longer than most to be a mother, I have always been fascinated by the number of Old Testament matriarchs whose situation was parallel to mine. When I found out I was pregnant, I, like Rachel, felt remembered by the Lord (Genesis 30:22–23, KJV). And like Sarah, I also felt cause to “laugh” or rejoice (Genesis 18:12). But of all these women who waited upon the Lord for the privilege of bearing a child, Hannah’s story of enduring prolonged infertility—only to give up a long-awaited son for temple service—is perhaps the most unique account. And it is probably my favorite one to explore as well.

Part of what makes Hannah’s story so compelling is her motivation to become a mother. In an age when childlessness often resulted in a depleted socioeconomic currency for women, Hannah was actually in an enviable position. Her husband, Elkenah, clearly loved her and demonstrated his devotion by giving her a double portion of the sacrificial meat prepared each year—twice as much as the portion given to his other wife, Peninnah, and her children. Sacrificial food was associated with prestige, and so Hannah’s place in society does not appear to be in jeopardy.1 For some women, having a husband who is “better to [her] than ten sons” would have been sufficient (1 Samuel 1:8).

So, when Hannah weeps and prays earnestly in the temple for a child, she does not do so to please her husband or raise her social status. Nor is she seeking to cease Peninnah’s tauntings, as Peninnah delights in “provok[ing] her sore” for her childlessness (1 Samuel 1:6). Rather, when Hannah vows to “give [a son] unto the Lord all the days of his life,” she sees motherhood beyond companionship, economic security, and even personal happiness (1 Samuel 1:11). Child-rearing, in her mind, is an opportunity to contribute to God’s higher purposes. When Samuel is born, she reaffirms her pledge: that she “lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:28). The word “lent” in the King James Version may seem an odd word choice, as it could imply that she is allowing the Lord to “borrow” her son. But in later biblical translations, the word “lent” is replaced with “give” and “dedicate.” With these translations in mind, Hannah’s entrusting her son to God was intended to be a permanent arrangement.

As a mother, I feel particular pangs reading Hannah’s account; I wonder how she must have felt when she gave her small son to Eli. But Hannah seems to be at peace and even rejoices in the choice she has made, as depicted by her psalm in the subsequent chapter. As psalms are rarely credited to women in the Bible, Hannah’s lengthy song of praise after surrendering her child to temple service is a distinctive read, as she exultantly states: “My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, mine horn is exalted in the Lord” (1 Samuel 2:1). According to the LDS KJV footnote, “horn” is meant to reflect one’s capacity or power. Perhaps she felt the Lord’s endowment of additional strength, as she freely gave her child to the Lord for his purposes. Interestingly, she was given the experience of raising children in her home, as we learn that by the end of the story she had five more children.

Through a modern lens, Hannah’s account ostensibly feels out of touch: My covenant-keeping today is unlikely to require me to surrender custody of my child. But I want to believe that, like Hannah, I, too, may develop an attitude of trusting my child to God’s will and his higher purposes. But what does dedicating a child to the Lord look like now? And how do I achieve the same type of courageous attitude that this mother had many centuries ago?

Like Hannah preparing her child to serve God, I muse how I can demonstrate my desire to have God’s presence and guidance in my daughter’s life. In a few years, I will have the uncommon privilege of walking with my daughter to a temple that is just outside our neighborhood—a blessing that no doubt Hannah could not have imagined. But according to Doctrine and Covenants 93, the idea of worship is more than just the location itself—it is understanding who God is and believing that we, too, can actually become all that he is. The crux of the section occurs in D&C 93:19, stating that we “may know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father in my name, and in due time, receive of his fullness.” Suddenly, mortality is more than Plato’s cave, where we are only able to glimpse the shadows and flickers of a life beyond this one. Rather, worship is an act of unalloyed submission toward God because we know that he can thrust us to heights that our finite minds cannot imagine.

Hannah also has a firm grasp of God’s character and his transformative power. From her psalm, she clearly sees him as a being of knowledge, strength, and dependability (1 Samuel 2). While it is unclear whether she believed that we can become all that God is, she nonetheless views him as someone whose capacities in assisting his children are limitless, as she confidently states: “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory” (1 Samuel 2:8). After all, she has personally received God’s miraculous intervention, as seen by her transition from childlessness to motherhood. Her astonishing ability to give her son to the temple, then, is rooted in her knowledge of who God is and all that he can do for his children. If he has the power to give beggars and the poor a throne of glory—as well as miraculously giving her a long-awaited son—surely, he could give Samuel a marvelous future ahead. Lending one’s child to the Lord, then, appears to be a surrendering attitude, and an acknowledgement that God himself can make more out of our children’s lives than even the most loving parent can. While at first read, Hannah’s story appears to be rooted in the temple, much of her narrative centers on this psalm of faith in God’s capacity, demonstrating the endowment of power that comes when one understands who God is and what he can do.

That appears to be my task in hand: cultivating the courage to believe that God is the ultimate designer of my daughter’s life, rather than myself. Knowing that God finds joy in preparing her for a glorious future should certainly act as a source of comfort for me (D&C 1:39). But as I look into my daughter’s pure little eyes, I also wonder what it truly means to surrender her future to God. She has already experienced two goose eggs on her head as part of her determination to walk, and, at times, I shudder to think of those “goose eggs” that mortality will clap on her as part of her quest for godhood. And am I sufficiently prepared to help her navigate bullying, depression, unrequited love, or any of the other thorny elements of this life that she may face?

Again, my mind turns to Hannah, as she turns over her child to the Lord. She may have felt a measure of trepidation as well. Perhaps, as she made the annual visit to the temple, she heard of or even witnessed Eli’s sons’ reprehensible misconduct. Perhaps she wondered if she had actually made the right choice. Perhaps she second-guessed her decision and worried how her son would fare growing up alongside these men and with their high priest father, who did little to prevent their heinous acts. But she also probably finds solace in the sanctity of her pledge to the Lord, as she confidently states in her psalm, “There is none holy as the Lord/for there is none beside me/neither is there any rock like our God” (1 Samuel 2:2).

In Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, is in a position similar to Hannah’s: he recognizes his looming death and, consequently, must trust God to take care of his young son. To prepare for his end of mortality, the narrator writes a series of letters containing advice, family heritage, and wisdom gathered throughout the years for his son’s reference. In one of his letters, he recounts a past sermon he gave on Abraham:

I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he believes. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. . . . I think . . . any father . . . must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. . . . Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

There is something unspeakably precious about knowing that God can send angels to my child in those pivotal, urgent moments. Ames notes that it is not until Abraham is fully willing to sacrifice his two sons that the angels appear to make the necessary intervention. And after Hannah leaves Samuel with Eli, God’s voice is manifest to protect the child from corrupt influences that had seeped into his temple upbringing. The efficacy of this divine ministration is illustrated when Samuel is described as a God-fearing child, who did let none of [the Lord’s] words fall to the ground” (1 Samuel 3:19).

Similarly, I wonder if fully surrendering my will for my children to the Lord may further enable them to have those much needed divine interventions. Perhaps part of entrusting God with my daughter is to trust his timing and methods for her, allowing him and his angels, on either side of the veil, to work wonders on her behalf.

Still, I will not pretend that cultivating this attitude is always easy. I wish that I could wipe away any future tears and sorrows as easily as I clean her food-stained face. But fortunately, it appears that parents like me can receive that “horn” or added measure of power that Hannah sings about in the beginning of her psalm through taking comfort that God can fashion the life that my daughter most needs. And in her most harrowing experiences in the mortal wilderness, I can trust that angels will be close by when I cannot be.

As I seek to develop faith like Hannah’s, I also take comfort in Kahlil Gabran’s words, as he creates a stirring image of God’s role in parenting to that of an archer, and the parent to the bow:

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
 The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
 Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
 For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Certainly, the act of lending a child to the Lord requires a significant bend, or yielding on our part, as we cannot see the “mark of the infinite” as God does. But it gives me hope that just as God molded Samuel for his greater purposes, my child too, can go “swift and far” to the bullseye of her eternal destiny.

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Sarah Shumway Day has an MA in English literature from Boston College and an MBA from Brigham Young University. She lives in Lehi, Utah with her husband and daughter.

Art by Paul César Helleu (1859–1927).

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The story of Saul and the rise of the united monarchy needs to be read in a larger context to understand the theological and ideological stakes. There are continuities in the books of Deuteronomy through Kings that have led scholars to consider them to be a coherent Deuteronomistic History. The theory, first advanced by Martin Noth in 1943, posits that these books were an extended history of Israel, written by a single author or compiler during the Babylonian Exile.1 Later scholars identified additional themes and complex structures in these books, leading them to argue for layers of composition. Most recently, a synthesis by Thomas Römer, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Collège de France, proposed that the Deuteronomistic History was the product of a scribal school active from before King Josiah down through the Persian period.2

In concrete terms, the continuities within the so-called Deuteronomistic History can be seen in the theology of kingship. The claim of the scriptures from Deuteronomy onwards is that righteous kingship works as a political system, as exemplified in David and Josiah. The book of Judges, for example, anticipates the rise of the monarchy when it twice states, including as the last line of the book, that, “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did as he pleased” (Judges 17:6; 21:25). However, there is clearly a debate within the text of scripture that problematized the inevitability, or at least the desirability, of the rise of the monarchy. This ideological tension is enacted through warnings and stories in 1 Samuel 8–12, with alternating arguments for and against the rule of monarchs. Scholars think these alternating texts may represent different sources (an early pro-monarchic source and a later anti-monarchic source):

Anti: 1 Samuel 8; 1 Samuel 10:17–27; 1 Samuel 12:1–25

Pro: 1 Samuel 9:1–10:16; 1 Samuel 11:1–15

And this debate is enacted in the lives and reigns of the kings, from Saul onwards. Ultimately, the history of the kings of Israel and Judah confirms the suspicions of the anti-monarchists. In the four centuries of monarchic rule, the children of Israel only experienced six entirely good kings, and none of these were in the northern kingdom (though this may represent the bias of the author of Kings).

That this is an overarching theme in the Deuteronomistic History is seen in the fact that before there were even kings in Israel, there was a theology of ideal kingship. This is described in Deuteronomy 17:14–16 (emphasis added):

Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your own people; you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kin. Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses, since the Lord has warned you, “You must not go back that way again.” And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess. When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the levitical priests. Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws. Thus he will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long in the midst of Israel.

Notice how the king is subject to the law rather than being a source of law, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi (d. 1750 BC) was. Notice, too, how the warnings against royal excesses are echoed in 1 Samuel 8:10–18 and seem to have David and Solomon in mind. Knowing the Deuteronomist, the warning is doubtless against the marriage to foreign wives who lead kings astray, something that is well illustrated in the story of Solomon and other kings and epitomized in the figure of Jezebel.3 The ideal king imagined by these verses is probably Josiah (2 Kings 22–23).

The embrace of kingship was not only a rejection of God as king but a rejection of a covenant relationship with God that relied on the righteousness of the people. What Israel wanted was for Samuel to “appoint a king for [them], to govern [them] like all other nations” (1 Samuel 8:6). Naturally, Samuel was offended—he ruled as judge and wanted his sons to succeed him. But God reminded Samuel that “It is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected as their king” (1 Samuel 8:7). Instead of being loyal to God, the people sought a political system in which the burden of righteousness was placed upon the king. The king was loyal to God, and the people in turn showed loyalty to the king (we see many instances of how a king or future king punished those who were not loyal to the Lord’s anointed king). The people seemed to want to abdicate their own responsibility, their individual duty to be loyal to their heavenly king, and place that duty upon an earthly king. But Samuel disturbs the people’s hopes of escaping from their moral responsibility by telling them that “If you will revere the Lord, worship Him, and obey Him, and will not flout the Lord’s command, if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, [well and good]. But if you do not obey the Lord and you flout the Lord’s command, the hand of the Lord will strike you as it did your fathers” (1 Samuel 12:15).

Saul Among the Prophets

The first argument for kingship is Saul himself. Not the jealous, vengeful Saul that we meet later in his story, but the modest and handsome Benjaminite, who stands above his fellows not only in height but also in faithfulness, seeking guidance at the hand of the seer as he takes care of his father’s flocks. When Samuel suggests that Saul is the leader that all Israel are seeking (1 Samuel 9:20), Saul demurs, objecting that “I am only a Benjaminite, from the smallest of the tribes of Israel, and my clan is the least of all the clans of the tribe of Benjamin! Why do you say such things to me?” (1 Samuel 9:21).

As a sign that Saul has been chosen, Samuel tells him what he is to do next: “When you leave today.” The first part of this prophetic itinerary concerns recovering the lost asses and obtaining provisions. But then Samuel tells Saul that he will have a transformative encounter with the Spirit of the Lord. “After that,” Samuel tells him, “You are to go on to the Hill of God, where the Philistine prefects reside. There, as you enter the town, you will encounter a band of prophets coming down from the shrine, preceded by lyres, timbrels, flutes, and harps, and they will be speaking in ecstasy. The spirit of the Lord will grip you, and you will speak in ecstasy along with them; you will become another man” (1 Samuel 10:5–6, emphasis added). And then, “As [Saul] turned around to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart; and all those signs were fulfilled that same day” (1 Samuel 10:9, emphasis added). All of these things happened as Samuel foresaw, and when people saw Saul speaking in ecstasy among the prophets, they asked, “Is Saul too among the prophets? (1 Samuel 10:11).

Saul was not only anointed, but he was transformed by “the spirit of the Lord.” For readers of the Book of Judges, this all sounds familiar. The “spirit of the Lord” was involved in the call of four of the “judges” (“chieftains” in the Jewish Publication Society translation). “The spirit of the Lord descended upon [Othniel] and he became Israel’s chieftain” (Judges 3:10); “The spirit of the Lord enveloped Gideon” (Judges 6:34); “The spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah” (Judges 11:29); and “The spirit of the Lord moved [Samson]” (Judges 13:25). In each case, the chieftain is moved to action and achieves victory for Israel. In Samson’s case, the spirit of the Lord forcefully intervenes three additional times (Judges 14:6, 19; 15:14). In each call, the spirit of the Lord has a transformative and enabling effect. Saul’s experience with the spirit of the Lord is sufficiently similar to reassure us of the continuities, but there are subtle differences; to see these, it is important to pay close attention to the language used and the results produced.

Firstly, the effect of the spirit of the Lord is enacted in the book of Judges, usually in a quelling of Israel’s enemies in a significant victory, or, more unusually, in tearing apart a lion (Judges 14:6). The chieftain, newly galvanized, empowered by, or gripped with the spirit, rallies the troops and goes on to victory. Using the same verb as Judges 14:6, the spirit of the Lord “gripped Saul” in 1 Samuel 11:6, and he goes on to rally Israel and win a great battle against the Ammonites. But in the case of Saul, the effects of the spirit are described in greater detail, as when we learn that when the spirit of the Lord gripped him, “his anger blazed.” This rage will reappear in Saul’s decline and fall. The story of Saul is one in which a peculiar sensitivity to spiritual affect can have both glorious and catastrophic consequences.

Before we return to the rage, note how the effect of the spirit of the Lord in Saul’s first encounter with Samuel and the band of prophets was ecstatic, personally transformative, and conditional. When Saul met this band of prophets, “he spoke in ecstasy among them” (1 Samuel 10:10, Jewish Publication Society version). In the NIV and ESV, the meaning is more surprising: “he prophesied among them.” Saul is not simply ecstatically praising God among the prophets but prophesying among them. This whole experience was transformative. “You will become another man,” Samuel prophesied, and indeed, Saul was changed by this encounter: “God gave him another heart” (1 Samuel 10:6, 9). The subtle subtext of this anointing and transformation of Saul is the need to continue to hearken to the prophet’s voice, and failing to do this is at the root of Saul’s undoing.4

So far so good. There are, however, other passages relating to the “spirit of the Lord” or the “spirit of God” in the story of Saul that raise questions. What does it mean, for example, when we are told, “Now the spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord began to terrify him” (1 Samuel 16:14, JPS)? Immediately before this, David had been anointed by Samuel, “and the spirit of the Lord gripped David from that day on” (1 Samuel 16:13). David is now the anointed king, enjoying the favor of God and the power of his spirit. What is interesting is that the spirit of the Lord did not simply depart from Saul, but that he was now terrified by “an evil spirit from the Lord” (1 Samuel 16:14, 15), or “an evil spirit of God” (1 Samuel 16:15, 16). This spirit produced a rage that could only be quelled by a well-played lyre. The reader may have some qualms at this point.

The diligent Latter-day Saint reader will consult the footnotes and be comforted that the JST reads “an evil spirit which was not of the Lord” in the first instances, and “an evil spirit which is not of God” in the latter. This is an elegant solution. Modern scholars who also find the phrase perplexing have offered other solutions—linguistic rather than theological or textual. One scholar, for example, points out that the collocation “evil spirit” in Hebrew is not a noun-adjective combination, but rather “a construct chain” which is better translated as “the spirit which brings forth disaster.”5 Another scholar unpacks the phrase as “a spirit that is sent from Yahweh to carry out a negative mission.”6 Perhaps a useful analogue is the “angel of the Lord” sent to destroy Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 24:15–16. Or the destroying angel sent among the murmuring desert-wandering Israelites (Numbers 14:37), as described in 1 Corinthians 10:10.

This solution may not be entirely satisfactory. As Walter Brueggemann notes, such a solution may “trouble our positivistic minds.” But “we must remember that the world of the biblical perspective is a world without secondary cause. All causes are finally traced back to God, who causes all . . . . This narrative simply assumes that the world is ordered by the direct sovereign rule of God. All the spirits that beset human persons are dispatched from this single source.”7

We could also extend the intertextual context further. The author(s) of Samuel may have had the book of Exodus in mind when crafting the Saul–David dynamic, connecting the Deuteronomistic History with the Pentateuchal narrative. In this schema, David is a new Moses under threat by Saul, who plays the role of Pharaoh. My suggestion is that the “injurious spirit from the Lord” in 1 Samuel 16:14–16 might function the same way as God hardening Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus 7:3–4, 13, 14, 22; 8:15, 19, etc. (compare Romans 9:17–18). In both instances, it is this unexpected divine intervention that drives the story forward and produces a dynamic and taut narrative. In both instances, Joseph Smith intervenes, and it is precisely this which made me think they might be connected. What seems to us a problem to be fixed is perhaps the splendid peculiarity and power of the Bible—and the worldview it reveals—shining through. After all, the God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart also brought about the Exodus, just as the God who troubled Saul gave David the confidence to slay Goliath. Embracing the miraculous stories of the Hebrew Bible may sometimes require us to wrestle with an unfamiliar theological worldview.

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Kristian S. Heal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His research focuses on the reception of the Hebrew Bible in early Christian literature and worship. He received a BA in Jewish History from University College London, an MSt in Syriac studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Theology from the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Genesis 37 and 39 in the Early Syriac Tradition (Brill, 2023) and co-editor of Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, published by the Maxwell Institute. Kristian was also the resident scholar for the Maxwell Institute’s Abide podcast on the Old Testament (50 episodes).

Art by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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Wayfare magazine congratulates the inaugural winners of “Behold the Man!,” our annual contest for poems about or related to Jesus of Nazareth.

This year’s judge was James Matthew Wilson, the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas.

Sally Thomas

Luminous Mystery

A man came walking up and down the world. 
Another man, in camel’s hair and leather,
With honey on his lips, cried out, Prepare. 
The river flowed between its banks. The weather,
Unsettled, threatened thunder. One dove hurled
Itself out of the sky. Those who were there
Have testified. The first man went somewhere
To hide. The fuss died down for weeks. But when 
Reports at last began to circulate—
Along the coast, a rash of fishermen
Walked off the job, and on a Saturday
Someone who’d had a demon lost it—Fate
Will out, they said. In spring, the scent went cold. 

*
Again this Holy Week, the scent’s gone cold. 
Beneath the grass, the dead grow ever old.
We’re left to witness how the evening light
Flames low on the horizon. In the night,
A feast consumed is something else again:
Sharp fire and darkness, aftertaste of wine
And sleep, metallic in the mouth. The trees
Have wreathed themselves in white beneath low skies
That gather for a storm. Each year the same. 
All time’s a Caesar’s penny with his name, 
His face stamped on in profile, ever turning
Toward this world that makes a work of burning
Itself to ash. Each day’s a judgment day. 
Thy kingdom come, he teaches us to say.

James Matthew Wilson’s comment on “Luminous Mystery”:
This double sonnet begins with a recounting of the Gospel narrative reduced to the simple sentence structures of a primitive chronicle. The effect is to make the story of our salvation strange to us. The man who walked up and down the world goes to “hide.” One Saturday, fishermen walk off the job. The initial effect is not entirely pleasant; the paratactic sentence structures speak in defiance of the music the pentameter lines would otherwise allow to rise and at times risk a mere awkwardness on the ear. But not only is this first part interesting in itself, and not only does its method of narration almost acquit its deliberate style, it leaves us totally unprepared—in the best sense—for the sonnet to follow that draws us into the fluent sentences of a subjectivity at prayer, one that speaks with understanding, indeed a fell understanding, that sees history for what it is: “All time’s a Caesar’s penny with his name.” Here, the sonnet’s rhymes brought to the tight proximity of couplets, the poem holds forth with music and wisdom.

Luca D'Anselmi

Co-Redemptrix

After the murder, when he fled the pope,
the painter hid in Valmontone where
he paid for wine by frescoing the church
burned later when the allies marched on Rome:
Santa Maria delle Grazie.
The frescoes now survive in photographs.
In one, Mary turns her face away
from where her son lies stretched out on the ground,
unraised and only partly crucified.
The executioners have fled the scene,
too frightened by the darkness in the sky
to finish what they’ve only just begun.
She groans for Abraham’s pure confidence
to swing the blade above his only son—
a father’s final fiat not to quail.
No ram yet in a thicket, just the rocks.
No one but her to finish what’s begun.
She looks down at the hammer and the nails.

Sally Thomas

Innlight

They met him on the road, in kicked-up dust. 
The hour waned as yesterday’s had done.  
They urged him to break bread, as travelers must, 
Though he’d made a pretense of going on 
Past nightfall. All three stopped to wash their feet. 
Three windows dropped their brightness on the street. 
 
The hour waned as yesterday’s had done,
Clear, blue, and cool. Three shadows wavered, long,
Behind them in the dust. The westering sun
Slipped down. The wind that met them smelled of strong
Sharp cedar smoke. Pricked out in chilly beauty,  
The first star glimmered. Conscious of a duty,  

They urged him to break bread, as travelers must 
When thrown together. At the door, they said, 
He stripped and bent to rinse the film of dust 
From their feet, then his own. The dead lay dead—  
A stranger’s graceful gesture, that was all.  
Three sets of wet footprints went down the hall.  

Though he’d made a pretense of going on, 
He let the two beguile him with their talk  
Of road’s-end ease, of fire and bread and wine 
And company well met. He let them walk  
Him through the low doorway, seat him at table.  
New lambs were crying in a distant stable. 
 
Past nightfall, all three stopped to wash their feet, 
In smells of sweat and baking bread and barnyard, 
Most welcome smells, fermented, homely, sweet 
To wanderers in the world. The inn-wife barred 
Her door against the dark. No room tonight  
For idlers. They laughed. She struck a light. 
 
Three windows dropped their brightness on the street.  
Inside, the table set with bread and wine  
Awaited them, with dates and roasted meat  
And olives polished by the firelight’s shine.
The sharp smoke rose in strands. The dead lay dead. 
They knew that now. The new man broke the bread.   

Laura Schaffer

Pieta

How well can marble say what it was like 
to hold her son that final day, beneath 
the knocked-together tree now seared to sign?
His body gone a mute, ungainly thing,
how much of memory could she have begged  
back from its weight, its sense of fallen-from? 
What burden death his body must have been. 

We find her there in labored stillness, left 
to bear what there was left to bear of this,
her lap composed as if to suffer it, 
the very word and its refusing form.

Here were the frame and surfaces of him, 
the ribs all sunk to such a blankness that 
the world was bled the very slack of death
within the prayer of holding him once more.
The world. And yet in moment marble, here, 
she breathed, the word is speaking truth and bone. 
Unbroken word that was, that is, will stay, 
would raise at last the third and unlost day. 

Elijah Perseus Blumov

The Flaming Rose of Chartres

On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the opaline colors of heaven.
– Henry Adams

Red diamond, quatrefoil, prophet and king
caught in the flaming glass where angels sing: 
Hell is the overflow of Heaven’s glory.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri.

Marie enthroned can hear her baby crying,
each sob a nail– she sees her baby dying, 
but she must serve her part within the story.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri.

Imprismed in the light, lily and dove
sparkle within a bloodstained jewel of love,
its facets strange and glistening and gory.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri. 

O thorn-encrusted, bright, tear-spangled rose,
let me not burn, but learn what Heaven knows:
joy is the gem, and suffering the quarry.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri. 

Elijah Perseus Blumov

Annunciation

Please. I love you. Do not turn from me. 
No, you will not believe. But I must speak,
and would not speak if it was not the truth.
I ask for no belief. Only your faith.
I woke in darkness, burning in my belly.
I tumbled out of bed, nearly convulsing,
and crawled along the floor to find a lamp.
I found none, and the fire only worsened,
as if the sun itself blazed deep inside me. 
My only thought was water. Reach the well. 
The moon was full, so she could guide my way,
and since I’m yours, no man would dare to touch me. 
My hands shook– they could hardly work the latch.
But, somehow, I collapsed and pushed it open.
And then, I saw it: dazzling in the moonglare, 
it seemed at first to be a towering shadow,
the moon beyond its head forming a halo. 
But then, I saw it truly. And such fright
consumed me that I found I couldn’t scream. 
Yosef. It was a moth. A monstrous moth.
Its shining fleece as long as any lamb’s,
each eye a thousand eyes, and on its wings–
relentlessly white wings– more golden eyes,
and on its head, antennae to the stars. 
It looked at me. Six arms stretched down to me. 
Then, suddenly, my fear became deep peace. 
It had no mouth, but still it seemed to speak,
I know not how, but in my very bones: 
Shalom, Miriam, it seemed to say. 
And darling, at that moment, scalding pain 
became the utmost pleasure: warm and molten,
trickling from my guts into my loins.
I cried and cried. Yosef, it felt so good.
I would not tell you this, but it is true. 
I fainted, and I woke up here with you. 
Days after that was when I showed the signs. 
If now you want to leave, I understand.
But do not hate me. Please, you must not hate me. 
Forgive me. Be his father. Take my hand. 

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In this brief essay, I hope to make a simple argument: that the physical demonstrations we make while praying can serve as a powerful catalyst for religious devotion, especially in 2026. Specifically, the subtle physical manifestations of prayer can create a countercultural environment that facilitates communion and transcendence.

Those raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are taught the form of our regular prayers when we are very young. It is striking that, even in a classroom filled with the youngest of children, a teacher can generally achieve brief unity and reverence if the children know someone is praying. By the same token, if you attend a Saturday night ward activity filled with boisterous conversation and happy chaos, you will be struck by how quickly almost every sound in the hall will cease as the crowd becomes aware someone is praying. Specifically, when members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pray, they (like many other religious adherents) generally observe three outward signs: we close our eyes; second, we fold our arms; and, third, we bow our heads.

For lifelong church members, these actions become so reflexive it is easy for them to become rote. I know that in my own life I long ago stopped thinking about them. After more than forty years of offering prayers of various kinds, these elements are now as natural as breathing. It was not until I started to teach my own children to pray—and, specifically, it was not until the daily struggle to get three often quarreling boys to observe these steps when we pray before eating—that I began to wonder if there was not something more to them.

For example, what does it really mean to clasp our hands in our laps as we pray? Of course, anyone who has ever taught a nursery class will know that, for small children, this can be a powerful protection against bothering your neighbor. If the only thing praying does is to get Timmy to stop poking Rachel, it may already be a success. Still, I would argue there is also more going on, especially against the backdrop of modernity. Perhaps part of the reason we still our hands as we pray is precisely because stilling our hands has become such a profoundly countercultural, almost iconoclastic, act. How often do we prevent our hands from engaging with our cell phones, if nothing else?

In my own case, I use my hands almost constantly. If I am not using them to peck on my cell phone, then I am using them to type out an e-mail on my laptop. If not that, then I am using them to examine a patient, or to whip up dinner, or to guide my bike as I ride into work, or to throw the football as my children bounce on the trampoline. To be clear, the activities for which I use my hands fall along a spectrum of goodness. Engagement with my cell phone is at best superfluous and at worst corrosive. Throwing the football to my boys or palpating the edge of the liver of one of my patients can be beautiful, constructive, and substantive.

But whatever the details, as I move through my day, I am forever using my hands to do something. In this regard, the act of interlacing my own fingers and putting my hands in my lap reminds me of a dictum I often hear from palliative care doctors. These doctors, trained in the arts of communication and symptom control, will often tell me, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” This refrain reflects as well the Taoist principle of wu wei—the idea that sometimes the cultivation of mindfulness and presence requires a conscientious, willful, and chosen inaction. To clasp my hands while I pray is to choose not to engage with all the other things my hands could be doing; it is to choose a purposeful way of clearing the spiritual and intellectual space needed to allow openness to communication from the divine.

Closing our eyes can have a similar effect. While humans are blessed with five senses, most of us look first to the visual realm to get our bearings and to understand how to move through the world. There is a reason the operative verb in the last sentence is “look,” rather than “hear,” “smell,” or “taste.” We are, most instinctively, visual creatures. Thus, closing our eyes has to do with shutting out the overwhelm of immediate visual perception, making room for the sensory input we too often neglect and ignore.

At the same time, perhaps we close our eyes not just to empower our four other physical senses in the absence of sight, but also to remind us that sensory input does not monopolize what matters in life. In our heavily digitized and technologically saturated culture, it can often feel as though bits, bytes, and information are all that matter. We have often come to accept the idea, for example, that the version of life contained in our “feeds”—think Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat—comprise all that’s really needed. What strikes me about this idea, however, is that these experiences are largely visual, with some corollary aural information thrown in. It is as if we believe we can watch the pictures and videos that flit by on our devices and somehow thereby arrive at happiness, meaning, or both.

But as we still our hands and close our eyes during prayer, we are reminded that some of life’s most magnificent truths cannot be articulated. The ineffable will always remain irreplaceable; many of the things that matter most can only be understood, as the Little Prince once reminded us, as matters of the heart. Even if our hope is to make meaning of the information that flows into us unendingly from the digital world around us, we must make space away from those incessant inputs if we are to have hope of finding truth or meaning. Especially in a world where attention has been commodified, balkanized, and monetized, closing my eyes can represent a powerful and purposeful declaration that not all of my attention is for sale. Some sacred precincts of my heart and soul cannot be bought or sold on the open digital market; some private inner sanctum remains available only to me and to God.

And that brings us, finally, to bowing my head (and, at times, kneeling). Traditionally, to bow is to demonstrate humility and deference. I bow to one whom I consider to be my superior or my elder, whom I take to have wisdom, experience, and virtue that exceed my own. Of course, humility is not a very popular virtue in contemporary culture. We talk a great deal about independence, resilience, grit, and even courage, but humility is a lonely, almost forgotten, virtue, seen as weak, suspicious, or anachronistic. Especially in the United States, we are liable to fancy ourselves as rugged individualists. We may no longer have much use for the Hollywood westerns of the past, yet most of us still imagine ourselves as cowboys and cowgirls of a modern-day digital Wild West. We imagine, for example, that social media is a parade ground where all of us are simultaneously showcasing our individuality and ingenuity together.

The irony in all of this is that human beings have never before so effectively and comprehensively subjugated themselves to invisible masters. We imagine ourselves to be stubborn individualists, and yet the majority of us pass untold hours scrolling feeds on social media that are ruled entirely by algorithms over which we have no control and of which most of us are only vaguely, if at all, aware. It is as if the content of the books, magazines, and newspapers of yesteryear have been alchemized into an intravenous solution. Now, instead of going to a library and selecting a book to read, we flock to a strange sort of digital medical clinic. We sit ourselves down in chairs, stick out an arm, and ask to be hooked up to an IV. We have neither control over nor much knowledge about what is included in the solution that trickles into our veins, and yet we sit there with blithe faith that whatever infuses into our bodies, hearts, and minds will be to our good.

In this sense, we have now become idolaters. We no longer bow down before golden calves; instead we worship—without realizing it—the glowing gods of our smartphones and, even more so, the algorithms that control our digital feeds. In this context, the act of bowing my head during prayer is a radical act of choosing the object of my devotion. Even if I can only glimpse the character of the divinity I worship, yet this is a God I can actively seek and to whom I choose to be devoted. Unlike the nameless and faceless algorithms that rule the digital universe, the God I seek to worship is a pair of Heavenly Parents who are infinitely defined by mercy, justice, hope, benevolence, and love. Thus, choosing to bow my head in deference to this definition of divinity is both a symbol of my humility before God’s love and also a manifestation of my commitment to become more loving.

I wonder if a miracle of substance and symbolism is not hiding in plain sight. When I sit down at our kitchen table for dinner, and I work myself hoarse trying to lasso those three boys into some semblance of the physical manifestations of reverence, perhaps there is more going on than meets the eye. Perhaps this is not merely a way of enforcing some rote uniformity but, instead, a powerful and countercultural choice to lean into a visceral reminder of presence, mindfulness, beauty, humility, and the ineffable. Perhaps praying is an opportunity when, as Wordsworth once reminded us, “the world is too much with us,” to step away from the many ways in which the world infringes on our deepest selves and to resolutely reclaim a portion of our individual spiritual essence that can bring us closest to God.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To subscribe to Tyler’s column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Felice Casorati (1883–1963).

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I don’t know about you, but some of my biggest regrets in life involve acting outside of integrity by betraying my own understanding of right and wrong. This includes discounting my own inspiration from the Spirit of God, often in deference to others. Regrettably, there have been times in my life where I have acted as though I did not take myself or my personal revelation seriously—or at least as seriously as I should have. My experiences are at least in part a result of gendered messaging around the idea that people who are embodied differently than I am can be privy to a spiritual knowledge about me, and my life, that can trump even my own self-knowing.

One example is when I was twenty years old and preparing to serve a full-time mission. I met with my stake president as part of the protocol. Like many BYU students, I had never spoken with or even met my stake president prior to this formal interview about missionary service. He asked me to tell him why I wanted to go on a mission. After explaining my reasons, he confidently responded with: “You’re right, the Lord wants you to serve a mission.” Although there was nothing negative about this statement, I remember feeling bewildered. I did not doubt that the Lord wanted me to serve a mission and was not seeking validation in this area. Twenty-year-old me thought it strange that he felt the need to tell me I was properly perceiving the divine will for my life. I was already perfectly confident that I was doing the right thing.

While not a detrimental experience, this was a curious one. In ways, that encounter implied that I needed external legitimation in my spiritual decisions. In retrospect, that conversation engendered a sense within me that I ought not to take myself or my personal revelations seriously—or at least that I needed validation from a man in a position of religious authority before I could do so. The result is that I was left more vulnerable to what was a deeply negative experience on my mission; although the mission experience was quite different from my one-time meeting with the stake president, I cannot believe they are unrelated.

Early on in my full-time missionary service, I had strong promptings that I needed to go home at the conclusion of my mission during a specific month. It was over a year away and I was surprised that this was gnawing at me. However, because mission transfers were designed to work out evenly for elders who served for twenty-four months, they did not always work out evenly for sisters, who served for a shorter period. This meant that instead of serving for exactly eighteen months, I would go home a few weeks before or a few weeks after the eighteen-month mark. I brought this up to my mission president during zone conference interviews. During that conversation, I learned that the mission office had scheduled me to go home two months later than the Spirit was telling me I should. Because it was early in my mission, I decided to sit with this knowledge and think about it. Toward the end of my mission, I continued to feel that I needed to go home two months earlier. I approached my mission president, who wanted me to stay longer. After a lengthy back and forth, he finally pulled out the big guns and told me my impression to go home earlier was coming from the adversary. According to him, my revelation was from the wrong source; that was how my priesthood leader accounted for the mismatch. His wife intervened to explain that her husband was making decisions based on what he thought was best for his mission, not necessarily for me, and encouraged me to listen to my own revelation. Although I took myself seriously for a moment, ultimately the guilt and self-doubt won out and I stayed the extra two months, as my mission president had asked. There were blessings during that time, yet the net effect of that last transfer was destructive. For years afterward, I harbored guilt about the deleterious effects of extending my mission rather than returning home to where I believed I was needed much more.

I have come to understand this experience and others like it as instances of spiritual self-betrayal or simply spiritual betrayal. I knew what was true for me and what God wanted me to do. Rather than being faithful to God and myself and my revelation, I betrayed it and broke the divine trust in me, my own self-trust, and enervated my trust in the divine. This was more than the presence of spiritual betrayal; it was also the absence of spiritual fidelity.

In order to better understand an alternate model of spiritual fidelity, I look to a female exemplar from scripture. In the second chapter of first Samuel, we encounter Hannah uttering a profound if protracted prayer, one that presages the Magnificat of Mary that would be pronounced about ten centuries later. In this scene, Hannah is in the temple praising God and dedicating her son Samuel, consecrating him to the Lord’s service. Like Mary would later do, Hannah prophesied that God would create justice on the earth and make wrong things right. She predicted that God would raise the poor from the dust, and lift the needy from the heaps of ashes so that they would sit alongside royalty in seats of honor (1 Samuel 2:8–9). This is just one example of many that Hannah offers to support her claim that God both brings people low and exalts them (v. 7), depending on their needs. Hannah sings the following praise: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies because I rejoice in your victory” (v. 1, NRSV). In this moment, Hannah rejoices not only in the victory of the divine but also in her own vindication that God has heard her prayer, made her a mother, and not just any mother but a mother of a prophet that will be celebrated in the Jewish and Christian traditions for millennia. Not only did God hear her—she heard God; she listened, she hearkened, and she overcame—and she knew it.

Hannah’s prayer beautifully anticipates and mirrors one of the most celebrated passages of Christian scripture, and she is recognized as the mother of a prophet. Yet in the previous chapter, Hannah is also found praying in the temple, and during that prayer, prior to Samuel’s birth, she was met with dismissiveness and disrespect. In 1 Samuel 1, the barren Hannah, whose pain over childlessness was only exacerbated by her husband’s other wife who had children, is described as appearing in the temple because “she was deeply distressed”; while she was there, she “prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly” (v. 10, NRSV). Promising God that if she bore a son she would consecrate him, she prayed silently while her lips mouthed the words. The temple priest, Eli, assumed she was drunk—and like men of privilege and authority often do, he acted on his assumption before getting curious or asking questions to test his hypothesis, and instead of learning from Hannah’s faithfulness and devotion, he judged and condemned her. Rather than accept his false accusations of inebriation and fleeing from the temple at his insistence, Hannah responds thus, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time” (vv. 15–16, NRSV). To his credit, Eli responds to Hannah’s self-defense and self-advocacy with blessings rather than curses.

There are many things that could be teased out of this story, but for now, I wish to focus on the fact that Hannah looked drunk: Perhaps today onlookers would be more inclined to pathologize Hannah than to assume she had imbibed some illicit substance. That is to say, Hannah looked crazy, but she wasn’t. She understood who she was to God, what she needed to do, and what she wanted. Hannah took seriously her righteous desires and her understanding of who God wanted her to be. Being sure of who she was and what she wanted to lay claim to, she was willing to do whatever it took, including risking respectability to both fulfill the divine will and secure the desires of her heart. Hannah took this risk for the sake of spiritual fidelity.

Let’s unpack what I mean by “spiritual fidelity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fidelity” means, among other things, “the quality of being faithful; faithfulness, loyalty, unswerving allegiance to a person, party, bond, etc.” and “strict conformity to truth or fact.” For fun, let’s add in one more: “Of a description, translation, etc.: Correspondence with the original; exactness” and “the degree to which a sound or picture reproduced or transmitted by any device resembles the original; esp. in high fidelity.” Hannah embodies all of these definitions as she stays true to her self-knowing, her personal revelation, and stands her ground to receive the blessings and social standing she needs to carry out her divinely given mission.

Hannah evinced what philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson describes as “gendered epistemic confidence.” The branch of philosophy known as epistemology, from which the word “epistemic” is derived, addresses questions of how it is that human beings attain knowledge and who has the authority to make knowledge claims. The term “epistemic confidence” refers to a person’s confidence in their own ability to know what is true and false—they recognize themselves as having the authority to know independent of others. Anderson contends that women often lack confidence in their own knowing, as well as their own ethical commitments and practices. She observes, “Confidence as a social phenomenon, but also as a practical disposition of trust in, or faith with oneself as another, remains vulnerable to personal contingencies,” such as gender and other factors that socially shape bodies.1 To have confidence is to be able to say “I can” in regard to knowing and acting in a way that is congruent with that knowledge; yet too often, gender and other factors of embodiment leave a person feeling that within their social context they cannot know and act in accordance with that knowledge.

Women are often at a remove from their own knowing and, as result, from acting with integrity in accordance with that knowing, precisely because they lack this epistemic confidence. They doubt even their own experiences, including spiritual ones, because they believe their knowledge and epistemic confidence must be mediated by others. As the post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly put it, “Women have been unable even to experience our own experiences.”2 In order to protect not only women but all people from such detrimental circumstances, we must allow God to mediate our relationship to the Church and also recognize that just as with Hannah, sometimes it is those in power that need to re-examine their assumptions and perceptions, rather than just the less powerful people whose views may come into collision with them. If I had better understood this more than half of my life ago, I believe I would have made better decisions, ones that were more in line with my understanding of my personal revelation, and been willing to stand my ground when the legitimacy of that revelation was called into question by others with male bodies and institutional power. I would have trusted that ultimately I needed to answer to God for my missionary service and every other part of my life. I would have made choices that reflected the understanding that I live with more accountability to God than to a fallible leader.

In Mosiah 4:9, Benjamin teaches that human beings should always remember that they cannot understand all that the divine understands, “that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.” Here, Benjamin encourages all human beings, regardless of gender, to take a stance of epistemic humility in relation to the divine, recognizing the provisional nature and limits of their own knowledge relative to divine knowledge. Although this is a message I wholly endorse, with regard to the topic of spiritual fidelity and gendered epistemic confidence, I propose that women consider taking “man” here not as a synecdoche for human beings, but in a literal gendered sense. Read this way, Benjamin’s imperative can be interpreted as an injunction for women to resist the diminishment of their sense of confidence as knowers. In the face of both external and internal pressures to discount their own personal revelation, women are to keep in check external (male) resistance to their revelation, since even male authorities cannot know or comprehend all that God does. We can re-read this scripture as an invitation for women to trust and fear God more than men.

One of our greatest challenges in staying faithful to personal revelation is when it comes into conflict with our values of pleasing others or appearing to be nice. This is one of many reasons that, as a community, Latter-day Saints need to hold up the value of integrity and rank it above niceness and people-pleasing when they are at odds with one another. In moments of tension, we must recall Paul’s teaching that seeking human approval and “people-pleasing” subverts the project of being a servant of Christ (see Galatians 1:10). Hannah models this prizing of integrity beautifully, and she is willing to tell Eli that he is wrong, because he is, as scripture makes plain. In this instance, she is the only one who has the full perspective. It is the woman, in this narrative, who carries the whole story and brings God’s purposes to fruition. She believes her own experience of God and does not allow someone else to distort her confidence in that knowing.

Another thing we can tease out from Hannah’s story is that Eli jumped to conclusions about her without getting curious and asking questions. Perhaps due to his privileged position and his priesthood authority, he was overly confident that he could know the intent and meaning of Hannah’s actions without asking her for help in understanding those things. How familiar does this seem? How often do members of the Church, especially those with privilege, including epistemic privilege,3 think that they know where someone is coming from to such a degree that they don’t need any information or enlightenment from the person themselves? The priesthood or the gift of the Holy Ghost cannot replace interpersonal communication and getting to know someone. I cannot imagine that our Heavenly Parents would ever want us to use—or in this case, abuse—these gifts in such a way, since it ultimately disrespects and even dehumanizes our spiritual siblings. In such situations, we might consider genuine dialogue—with all its attendant vulnerabilities—as part of the process of studying things out in our minds (see D&C 9:8) and doing our due diligence to seek out facts and truth prior to forming judgments; this practice further protects us from forming erroneous beliefs that the Spirit will simply reveal things to us in our indolence while circumventing the difficult work of engaging with others even when it requires discomfort. While we learn to take Eli as a negative example of how we should not erroneously judge others, we can take Hannah as a positive example of having the personal confidence and spiritual fidelity to self, God, and others to push back and boldly advocate. She loves God, herself, and her neighbors, including Eli, too much to let Eli take the easy way out and dismiss her. That dismissal would compromise both the well-being of her contemporary religious community and all of salvation history.

Hannah’s example as a “woman of valor”4 does not alleviate the need for systemic shifts. I invite us to look at the way Paul makes Jesus’s self-emptying in the incarnation as prescriptive for Christian communities as a means to think about shifting away from the dangers of epistemic privilege. Paul says that although Jesus had equality with God pre-mortally, Jesus did not consider this equality something to exploit—instead he abased himself to become human (Philippians 2:6–7). Paul exhorts the Christian community to “let this same mind be in you” (v. 5). In contemporary parlance, I like to put it this way: Christ offers us an example of giving up privilege to live in solidarity with others. What it means to be Christlike is not to lord one’s privilege over others, but to empty oneself of it, to give it up. For my purposes here, I analogize this to the situation of people who have been granted undue epistemic privilege not by God but by culture, at the expense of women’s epistemic confidence. Those privileged individuals can likewise give up privilege and collapse the hierarchy that undercuts women’s own knowing and self-trust.

This seems to be an absolutely crucial step if we are to realize the prophecy of Joel, reiterated in Acts and by Moroni in a visit to Joseph Smith, in which God promised: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days I will pour out my spirit” (Joel 2:28–29, NRSV). It is not enough for God to pour out God’s spirit on all humanity—those individuals who receive that pouring out must also trust the revelation and prophecy that they receive. This requires not only that women trust themselves but that those who have undue epistemic privilege relinquish some of it so they can engender and support women’s epistemic confidence. In this way we can emulate the divine according to Hannah’s observation—and those of others who influence our texts of scripture—that God subverts human hierarchies by exalting the lowly and abasing the exalted.

A final thought on spiritual fidelity comes from a dialogue I had with a theologian and activist not of our faith. A few years ago, I hosted Mpho Tutu van Furth at BYU. We spent a lot of time traveling between church headquarters and Provo, so I was able to ask her a number of questions. I asked the one that was most pressing—I needed to know how the daughter of Leah and Desmond Tutu came to be the influential person that she was: “How did your parents raise you and your siblings to become activists?” She responded, “I don’t think they raised us to be activists; they raised us to be faithful.” I’ve been pondering this ever since. The most radical position we can take is to be faithful—to practice fidelity—to God, our own spiritual knowing, truth, and divine inspiration; doing so will often call us, like Hannah, to take difficult stands. Yet considering the counterfactuals can inspire us to maintain our position. What if Hannah hadn’t trusted in her own goodness, calling, and inspiration? What if she had allowed her spiritual leader to discount her faithful actions and equally faithful personal knowing?

Hannah, like many female exemplars in our canon, teaches us that faithfulness does not necessarily amount to compliance, especially when the expectation for compliance relies on another’s misperception. She takes herself and her revelation seriously in a way that is redemptive for the entire world. She knows that she is not only heard by God,5 but that she also hears God. Hannah’s example demonstrates that spiritual fidelity allows us to give birth to something new.

This essay appeared in Wayfare Issue 7.

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Deidre Nicole Green is an Assistant Professor of Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies at Graduate Theological Union and publishes on constructive feminist theology, Kierkegaard, and Mormon Studies.

Custom art by Jon Forsyth, who describes the connection: “The essay deals with the internal conflict that can arise when personal revelation does not align with ecclesiastical direction. In this art series, white boxes represent the institution, with golden paths indicating personal revelation and experience, which are not necessarily constrained by institutional boundaries, even when they are influenced by and often in conformity with those boundaries.”

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When I approached forty, I felt a quiet restlessness.

Not a crisis. Not dissatisfaction, exactly. The life I had crafted fit well enough. I had built something sturdy and meaningful. But something inside had been pressing outward, a low hum asking for more space, more breath. I did not yet know what spaciousness might feel like—or whether I could afford it. I only know that something in me kept tapping from the inside, and I kept finding ways to ignore it.

I see this same stirring in the women around me. My friends, my neighbors, the women I meet in therapy. Their children are older, their marriages shifting, their bodies no longer bending to old demands. Beneath the distress of depression or anxiety whisper questions they have carried silently for years: What is left for me? Who am I now?

Richard Rohr writes that the second half of life is a descent, not a climb. A letting go. No longer proving, no longer performing. A turning inwards towards the self that has been there all along, waiting patiently beneath the scaffolding of roles and expectations.

For me, that call was subtle at first, easy to overlook, like a thread showing through the weave of a larger, familiar pattern. For years I stitched together the scraps of traditional fabrics I had picked up along the way—people pleaser, overachiever, the one who made it look easy—checking the pattern the whole time. Is this how it’s done? Somewhere in all that piecing, my own voice got quiet.

Quilting brought it back.

I learned to quilt as a young mother, in the thin margins of a full life. My first quilts were tidy, traditional, cautious. But over time my hands grew bolder. I began cutting fabric in unexpected shapes, pairing colors that shouldn’t go together, leaving space for improvisation. The quilts began to look like me: less perfect, more alive. The process of quilting became a form of listening, a way to inhabit my own choices, a quiet practice of self-authorship. Life, I realized, is not simply following the patterns we inherit. It is also daring to alter them—to make something messier, something that bears your own fingerprints.

Quilting did not give me a voice so much as return me to one I had once misplaced. There was a year, before all of this, when I nearly lost it entirely.

I was living in Southern California then, newly transplanted, lonely in a landscape of curated Pinterest perfection. Chevron patterns were everywhere—walls, pillows, maxi skirts—and I absorbed the message that beauty meant sameness, that fitting in required smoothing edges. I grew quieter than I’d ever been. I remember standing in a Target aisle getting things for my new home. I stared at rows of identical throw pillows, unable to remember what I liked. I would text my best friend and then erase the message, unsure how to explain that nothing was wrong, exactly—and that made it harder to say anything at all. I complied. I performed. I tried to disappear into prettiness. I had the sense that I was living slightly beside my own life, without the language to understand it. It didn’t last long, but that season sometimes bleeds outwards in my memory, flattening everything that came before it, as though I were always that muted version of myself.

That story is too simple, though. And it is unkind.

The truth is, even then, I was not absent from my own life. I was bending where I could—changing course here, reconsidering there. What looks like silence from a distance is sometimes gestation. What looks like conformity is sometimes survival. We are never just one thing.

This realization has softened me toward my past. Just as every quilt is stitched from what came before—new prints, old shirts, inherited scraps—so too do our lives carry both the constraint and the courage of earlier choices. Nothing is wasted. Everything belongs.

This is what I carry into my work: the conviction that every life is a patchwork of becoming—torn, trimmed, re-hemmed. Not neat lines. Not single stories. But contradictions, surprises, shadow and light, angles and curves.

After years of quilting, I went back to school, drawn toward a profession that honored complexity. I became a therapist, sitting daily with stories that resist tidy conclusions. People do not arrive in straight lines and clean narratives. They come layered, contradictory, unfinished—shadow and light held together in the same body.

In my office, a quilt hangs on the wall behind the armchair I sit in. I took the traditional log cabin block, perhaps the most common quilt block, and altered it—softening its hard geometry. The pieces curve instead of meeting at right angles. The result looks like bowed figures. The quilting lines originate from their centers and expand outward, creating overlapping ripples, like drops in a pond. Often, when clients share the deepest pieces of themselves, their eyes drift from mine to the quilt. They trace the lines with their gaze, following the movement, finding their way through.

Our lives are rarely linear. They are storied in relationships, in choices, and in the retelling of our own choices. Midlife, then, is less about erasing what came before than about repurposing it with new eyes.

I couldn’t pinpoint the moment I realized that my life was not only something I had inherited but something I was still making. For so long, the fabric seemed already chosen, and the question was: How do I piece these together well enough? But at some point, the question instead becomes: What do I want stitched into the rest of my life?

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The book of Ruth, no more than a short story in length and scope, packs its few pages with a volume’s worth of moral reflection on love, self-sacrifice, and redemption. The narrative is familiar: Naomi is bereaved, Ruth is loyal, Boaz is generous, and the mutual devotion that develops between the three protagonists restores a lost lineage with the birth of Obed.

The story traces a hopeful arc from emptiness to fullness. Naomi’s lament that “the Lord hath brought me home again empty” (Ruth 1:21, KJV) has, by the end, become joy in the chosen grandchild she clasps to her breast, a “restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age” (Ruth 4:15). Beyond the marriage plot, the story’s portrayal of Naomi and Ruth represents the Bible’s most sensitive (and positive) exploration of women’s relationships. And Boaz’s role as go’el, or “redeeming kinsman,” is, for Christian readers, a powerful type of Christ our Redeemer, Bridegroom, and generous Friend.

The brisk plot reads as variations on the theme of “costly love.” The idea that love comes with a price tag of vulnerability, responsibility, and suffering gained prominence in Christian thought during the twentieth century in the work of, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (Costly love is the subject of my colleague Terryl Givens’s current study of Christian theology.) Christ’s suffering in the events of the Atonement was one staggering cost of his perfect love. Such love, Jesus taught, must be the foundation of the friendship that characterizes his disciples (John 13:34–35) and his church (1 Corinthians 13:4–8).

To be sure, recognition of love’s cost long preceded the ministry and passion of Jesus Christ. It is central to hesed, the divine lovingkindness at the center of the Hebrew Bible’s covenant theology and ethics—and a concept President Nelson taught Latter-day Saints to cherish. Hesed is a kind of loving faithfulness that exceeds the bounds of law or custom: It gives whatever is needful for the well being of the beloved regardless of conventional duty. In this way, hesed entails a certain overflow or excess.1 The book of Ruth portrays Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz as models of such costly love.

After the deaths of her husband and sons, Naomi frees her daughters-in-law from the expectation that they return with her to her native Bethlehem. She understands that the rupture would rip them from the only community they know and likely deprive them of the chance for remarriage. Better for them, she knows, to return to their mothers and build a new life. This will leave Naomi bereft of family, aged and defenseless, to make her new life alone. She could pressure the young women to stay with her, as custom demands. But she refuses to afflict Ruth and Orpah with her own misfortune, and so she urges them three times to return home with her blessing (Ruth 1:8, 11, 12). From Naomi, we learn that costly love doesn’t always require tightening a relationship. Sometimes it may require loosening.

Orpah indeed elects to return home. She is often reproached for this decision, but I’ll speak up on her behalf. The fact that love is costly does not mean that every costly action taken on behalf of another is necessary or necessarily loving. Tremendous acts of self-sacrifice can be misguided, unhelpful, harmful—or even, paradoxically, selfish, when they are undertaken to serve the emotional needs of the one who sacrifices. Given that Naomi freely and sincerely relieves her daughters-in-law of their obligation, I find Orpah’s decision to return home to be an honorable one.

Ruth’s devotion to Naomi, of course, reveals a deeply-felt attachment to her mother-in-law and a genuine desire to make her life at Naomi’s side: The word used in 1:14 for Ruth’s “cleaving” to Naomi is the same used in Genesis 2:24 to describe the two-as-one relationship of husband and wife. Ruth’s declaration of hesed is justly famous:

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16–17)

And she is as good as her word. She indeed cleaves to Naomi and makes their two lives one. Ruth works tirelessly for their mutual welfare as she labors in the fields (Ruth 2:7), shares provisions (2:18), obeys Naomi’s instruction (3:6), and risks her life and standing to secure their future with Boaz (3:9). Ruth’s loyalty goes well beyond the requirements of law and convention to bless Naomi’s life at real personal cost to herself. Ruth the Moabite is a paragon of hesed worthy of the God of Israel.

Boaz, for his part, displays steadfast generosity to the refugee women. He is called to act with higher love at each narrative turn, and he rises to the call every time. First he shares food and water with Ruth (2:14), and then he allows her to gather full stalks of wheat rather than the meager field leavings (2:15). After their nighttime encounter at the threshing floor, Boaz gives Ruth an immensely, even hyperbolically, generous gift of six measures of barley (3:15). Finally, Boaz, in contrast to the unnamed kinsman who acts as a miserly narrative foil, promises to marry Ruth—and thus to divide his estate and diminish the inheritance of his existing children. In this, he secures the women’s future and redeems his kindred.

As bridegroom, Boaz takes on the role of go’el, a family member who bears the right and responsibility to step in when a relative requires aid. Beyond its social utility, the go’el has theological significance: The Hebrew Bible uses go’el for God, Israel’s redeeming kinsman who reclaims them from slavery and restores them from exile. The book of Ruth directly likens Boaz’s generosity and the Lord’s hesed: In Ruth 2:12, Boaz blesses Ruth for taking refuge under the “wings” of “the LORD God of Israel.” Then at the threshing floor, Ruth asks Boaz to spread his “wing” over her (3:9; “skirt” in KJV). Boaz grants her request and becomes the human instrument of the divine shelter he earlier invokes. His costly love is the means by which God’s hesed arrives for Ruth and Naomi.

I’m deeply moved by the various expressions of costly love explored in the book of Ruth. I am the variety of sinner who suffers from an excess of self-absorption and self-regard. I regularly need admonitions to act generously, to give freely of my resources and my time, and to look outside my own projects and interests.

Nevertheless, valorizing costly love can pose problems. Some people, often but not always women, suffer from too little self-regard, not from too much. For them, emphasis on godly selflessness can feed extreme acts of self-sacrifice, bordering on self-erasure. In the most troubling scenarios, the call to “die to self” may feed unequal, unfree relationships in which one party is left voiceless, unable to assert her boundaries and needs. The self-giving party is instrumentalized as a means to somebody else’s ends; her sacrifice is made to serve external purposes in which she has no share. Though it may be demanded in the name of love, such “selflessness” is actually exploitation, and it is no part of the pure love of Christ.

In other cases, costly love can be weaponized as a form of moral high ground: C. S. Lewis memorably describes the dynamic wherein one person “surrender[s] benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them.” Under the banner of “unselfishness,” a person may, at best, engage in unnecessary and unhelpful self-sacrifice, or, at worst, manipulate those around her.

Feminist theologians have long recognized these difficulties. Some have argued that Christlike self-giving, freely chosen from a position of spiritual agency, is fundamentally different from coerced submission, and that only the former describes genuine discipleship. Others have questioned whether the costly love of the cross should be a model of redemptive suffering at all for those whose experience has been one of forced self-sacrifice. Still others have proposed that the highest vision of Christian love is the flourishing of both parties, not the dissolution of one into the other. The Latter-day Saint theologian who has explored these difficult questions most fully is Deidre Green, and her work deserves wide consideration.2

The book of Ruth suggests covenant as a solution to the problem of costly love. Ruth’s famous declaration to Naomi—“your people shall be my people, and your God my God”—is a covenant utterance, complete with a sealing oath (Ruth 1:16–17). Ruth’s covenant with Naomi accomplishes the work that all covenants undertake: namely, to create a new unity of purposes where there was division. More than a promise of care and provision, Ruth’s covenant hesed to Naomi fuses their purposes. Where Naomi goes, Ruth goes, because the two women now share the same goals and plans.

Seen in the light of covenant, Ruth’s love is costly indeed, but it is not self-erasure. True, she gives up a past life, but she enters a newly-formed joint life in which her flourishing and Naomi’s are no longer in competition. “Costly love” absent covenant would have made Ruth a self-sacrificial means to Naomi’s ends; the introduction of covenant transforms the moral situation by making their purposes mutual. Covenant ensures that Ruth, the one who bears the cost, has a share in the ends her sacrifice serves. Naomi’s redemption is Ruth’s redemption: Ruth’s child is laid on Naomi’s breast. Their covenant creates a common life in which the category of “whose ends” partially dissolves.

In the end, I remain unsettled. It’s clear that costly love is a powerful but risky idea. I confess that it poses a conundrum that I don’t yet know how to solve. I worry about any solution that dilutes the costly demands of Christian discipleship: “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). At the same time, Jesus commanded his disciples to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). Any interpretation of Christian love that erases the self cannot fulfill the commandment, because it eliminates one of its terms. Perhaps Naomi and Ruth’s covenant-bound relationship gives us a model of costly love in which the mutual flourishing of lover and beloved is achieved.

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Rosalynde Frandsen Welch is Associate Director and a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research focuses on Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in English from Brigham Young University. She is the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction, published by the Maxwell Institute, as well as numerous articles, book chapters and reviews on Latter-day Saint thought. Dr. Welch serves as associate director of the Institute, where she coordinates faculty engagement and co-leads a special research initiative.

Art by Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842–1942).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

What will you do after graduation?

What’s your career path?

What’s your plan?

My students hear these questions and their many variants almost daily from a constellation of mentors: teachers, parents, coaches, elders, and other well-meaning adults. These questions lurk in the background as they grapple with the A- that they fear will drop their grade point average and make medical school admission a far-off dream, or as they ponder just how much AI they can reasonably use as they rush to finish a research paper before turning to other assignments imminently due. This mindset determines how students discern the most lucrative summer internship option—“Should I intern with McKinsey, Meta, or Palantir this summer?”— or just the right volunteering opportunity that will allow them to remain buoyant against the undertows of the demands of accomplishment and attainment. Most often, these questions are asked not directly by any one person, but seemingly absorbed by osmosis through the amorphous matrices of digital culture endlessly available with the flick of a thumb—TikTok reels and Snapchat stories of influencers basking in performative success, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels showcasing the ersatz wonders of a life of social capital built on finely-tuned attention mills. From all directions, young people today face the brunt of a constant barrage of variegated calls for them to attain, succeed, perform, accomplish, secure, advance, and do.

Despite it all, my students admit that something is missing; despite the world at their fingertips and the relative comforts that globalized capital has provided unevenly to many swaths of the world, scores of students identify an unnamable, implacable dissatisfaction that runs just under the surface of their affairs—a thin thread of disquiet under the achievements, a hollowness that remains even after the college admissions letter or job placement offers are secured, a root of despair that doesn’t seem to dislodge. I have heard students use different adjectives to describe the sensation—a hollowness, an emptiness, a hunger, and an itch.

Zachary Davis, in his recent Wayfare article The Four Horsemen of New Theism, offers a sobering and unignorable diagnosis: things have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Along with Davis, a diverse chorus of scholars and philosophers have sounded the alarm on our civilizational course, ranging from Charles Taylor’s evaluation of the secular age,1 to Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s analysis of the loss of integral cosmology in the modern world,2 to David Abram’s call for a more interdependent ecology of the more-than-human-world.3 These varied analyses suggest that we are approaching the limits of the now-globalized, post-Enlightenment worldview and confronting the anthropological, epistemological, and cosmological voids it has left behind. In signaling a shift, the era’s trend of declining religiosity appears to be slowing and, in some cases, reversing. In its wake, a growing thirst for religious experience and spiritual encounter stirs.

Davis suggests this is a moment of re-enchantment. Amidst so much chaos and uncertainty, there is a greater yearning for a new story and for a new way of seeing—and being in—the world. We are looking for a narrative that will bridge the incoherence of contemporary culture with the depths of our intuitions, aspirations, and inner experience. Davis and his interlocutors offer a compellingly sober analysis of our situation. The next logical question, of course, is—now what?

For those of us eager to roll up our sleeves and work to build, in ways great or small, a better world—one that is more just, joyful, caring, beautiful, virtuous, wise, and receptive to mystery—what are we to do? Where does the work of re-enchantment begin? Whether we agree with those like Paul Kingsnorth who suggest Western civilization cannot be salvaged and that we must begin anew or we agree with those like Rod Dreher and see potential for civilizational rehabilitation, we will wake up tomorrow and grapple at first light with the question—how will I work, today, to build a re-enchanted world?

As a scholar of comparative religions, I believe that we can only rejuvenate Western culture to the extent we grow from our inheritance of intellectual, religious, and spiritual diversity. In the twenty-first century, the West is home to new communities of indigenous Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and other communities that exist and thrive at the intersection of multiple epistemic commitments. Re-enchantment ought not aim for perceived cultural purity, but rather—perhaps more essentially—for a shared, multi-polar vision of the human capacity for transcendence. A rehabilitation or reemergence will require both recovery and expansion—a return to origins that also honors the gifts and wisdom gained through all that has been encountered and learned along the way. T.S. Eliot captures this beautifully in the lines:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started  
And know the place for the first time. 

In all cases, it will be the duty of future generations—equipped with whatever tools, visions, insights, and questions we may offer them—to continue the work of re-enchantment after we are gone. A sense of re-enchantment must first animate how we teach the rising generations.

I teach religion, ethics, and philosophy across several institutions of secondary and higher education in the United States. As a doctoral student in the Study of Religion, I chose this path with the commitment to becoming a scholar-teacher of the world’s religious traditions, particularly Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic contemplative traditions. If my scholarship is concerned with the work of intellectually grappling with re-enchantment, my work as a teacher is to make the possibilities of re-enchantment intelligible and meaningful to broadly capable and diverse yet equally disquieted and existentially-thirsty audiences. Following the essential pedagogical inspiration of the Buddha’s teaching of the dharma, wisdom and insight are framed and delivered in myriad ways depending on capacity, language, and context. Each person, regardless of their capabilities, may receive the dharma; any good pedagogy is adaptable, fluid, and responsive. The re-enchanted world will only be built if we explore, consider, and teach the structures on which it may be built.

As a teacher of both high school and college students, I often think about the precarity of the current moment. Besides general and valid concerns of professional teachers being under resourced, under compensated, and under appreciated by students, parents, and the broader culture, teachers stand on the frontlines as translators and interpreters of an uncertain and confusing world. Teachers are generally left to their own devices in the work of molding coherent selves in a world that feels increasingly fragmented; each morning millions of teachers across the country must wake and discern how to best model, to absorptive and observant minds, how to be coherent beings in an often-incoherent world. The work of training young minds how to think, act, and be in the world, in society, in a nation, and in communities often seems an insurmountable task.

Despite the precarity, I also find hope in this moment’s potential for cultural re-enchantment. Teaching has a central and immediate role in turning these philosophical ideas into meaningful cultural, personal, and civilizational change. Teaching is a sacred vocation. The most apt image of a teacher, in my mind, is that of a fire kindler—either the tender of a simple deep-woodland campfire on a cool autumn evening or of a Zoroastrian athravan, a guardian of the temple fire. Teachers are tenders of the fire of wonder, those who guard and tend the holy fire of that which is essential for our survival in the long, cool, dark night of the modern world. Teachers are not charged with teaching students what to think, but the many ways of how one may think. As a teacher of religion, I do not see my role as that of a proselytizer seeking to convince students of a particular intellectual system or cosmological vision. Instead, I strive to create encounters that kindle their inner sense of wonder. That wonder may arise through my attempts to convey the zeal of a Sufi dhikr, the peace of moral certitude in an ethical case study, or the ungraspable clarity of insight cultivated in zazen meditation. Which tradition or experience resonates is ultimately up to the students themselves and whatever chord of longing it awakens within them. My pedagogical work, then, is the sacred art of tending wonder: inviting students to linger in the mystery and beauty of the world, and offering enough kindling for the next stage of their journey. Most importantly, our work lies in teaching students how to renew their own fuel so they may sustain their fire for the journeys that yet lie ahead long after they have left my classes.

In the work of wonder-tending, I see as essential the cultivation of a new anthropology that shifts a student’s primary focus from occupational and production-oriented ontological measures of one’s worth in the world to an ontology of a wonder, humility, and awe whose fruits are delight and joy. This calls for a multi-polar anthropology which draws on shared wisdom of the new ecumenical, multicultural, and inter-religious context of Western civilization and on cross-cultural intuitions of our human capacity for transcendence and re-enchantment. It is an anthropology that shifts the metric upon which we build out worldview from what do you want to do? to how are you going to be?

To this end, in my work as a teacher, I have tried to shift to new variants of the questions above when I teach or mentor students, such as:

What is the quality by which you want to be known by your grandchildren and neighbors?

What kind of home do you want to inhabit when you are older?

How do you want to be?

Most of these questions indicate a subtle but necessary shift towards a new anthropological vision—from product-oriented beings to process-oriented beings, and a shift from gaining understanding to gaining wonder and its fruits of humility, delight, and openness. It is a shift from the dominant post-Enlightenment anthropology of doing, towards a re-enchanted anthropology of being.

This essay is an excerpt of a longer essay exploring the methods for igniting wonder. Find the full-lenth version here.

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Peter Dziedzic is a PhD candidate in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at Harvard University. He is also working on a comparative study of walking pilgrimages around the world. He is currently an instructor in Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and has recently served as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Study of Religion at Harvard University and as a professor in Religious and Islamic World Studies at DePaul University.

Art by Karl Wiener. 1901-1949.

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

What will you do after graduation?

What’s your career path?

What’s your plan?

My students hear these questions and their many variants almost daily from a constellation of mentors: teachers, parents, coaches, elders, and other well-meaning adults. These questions lurk in the background as they grapple with the A- that they fear will drop their grade point average and make medical school admission a far-off dream, or as they ponder just how much AI they can reasonably use as they rush to finish a research paper before turning to other assignments imminently due. This mindset determines how students discern the most lucrative summer internship option—“Should I intern with McKinsey, Meta, or Palantir this summer?”— or just the right volunteering opportunity that will allow them to remain buoyant against the undertows of the demands of accomplishment and attainment. Most often, these questions are asked not directly by any one person, but seemingly absorbed by osmosis through the amorphous matrices of digital culture endlessly available with the flick of a thumb—TikTok reels and Snapchat stories of influencers basking in performative success, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels showcasing the ersatz wonders of a life of social capital built on finely-tuned attention mills. From all directions, young people today face the brunt of a constant barrage of variegated calls for them to attain, succeed, perform, accomplish, secure, advance, and do.

Despite it all, my students admit that something is missing; despite the world at their fingertips and the relative comforts that globalized capital has provided unevenly to many swaths of the world, scores of students identify an unnamable, implacable dissatisfaction that runs just under the surface of their affairs—a thin thread of disquiet under the achievements, a hollowness that remains even after the college admissions letter or job placement offers are secured, a root of despair that doesn’t seem to dislodge. I have heard students use different adjectives to describe the sensation—a hollowness, an emptiness, a hunger, and an itch.

Zachary Davis, in his recent Wayfare article The Four Horsemen of New Theism, offers a sobering and unignorable diagnosis: things have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Along with Davis, a diverse chorus of scholars and philosophers have sounded the alarm on our civilizational course, ranging from Charles Taylor’s evaluation of the secular age,1 to Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s analysis of the loss of integral cosmology in the modern world,2 to David Abram’s call for a more interdependent ecology of the more-than-human-world.3 These varied analyses suggest that we are approaching the limits of the now-globalized, post-Enlightenment worldview and confronting the anthropological, epistemological, and cosmological voids it has left behind. In signaling a shift, the era’s trend of declining religiosity appears to be slowing and, in some cases, reversing. In its wake, a growing thirst for religious experience and spiritual encounter stirs.

Davis suggests this is a moment of re-enchantment. Amidst so much chaos and uncertainty, there is a greater yearning for a new story and for a new way of seeing—and being in—the world. We are looking for a narrative that will bridge the incoherence of contemporary culture with the depths of our intuitions, aspirations, and inner experience. Davis and his interlocutors offer a compellingly sober analysis of our situation. The next logical question, of course, is—now what?

For those of us eager to roll up our sleeves and work to build, in ways great or small, a better world—one that is more just, joyful, caring, beautiful, virtuous, wise, and receptive to mystery—what are we to do? Where does the work of re-enchantment begin? Whether we agree with those like Paul Kingsnorth who suggest Western civilization cannot be salvaged and that we must begin anew or we agree with those like Rod Dreher and see potential for civilizational rehabilitation, we will wake up tomorrow and grapple at first light with the question—how will I work, today, to build a re-enchanted world?

As a scholar of comparative religions, I believe that we can only rejuvenate Western culture to the extent we grow from our inheritance of intellectual, religious, and spiritual diversity. In the twenty-first century, the West is home to new communities of indigenous Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and other communities that exist and thrive at the intersection of multiple epistemic commitments. Re-enchantment ought not aim for perceived cultural purity, but rather—perhaps more essentially—for a shared, multi-polar vision of the human capacity for transcendence. A rehabilitation or reemergence will require both recovery and expansion—a return to origins that also honors the gifts and wisdom gained through all that has been encountered and learned along the way. T.S. Eliot captures this beautifully in the lines:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started  
And know the place for the first time. 

In all cases, it will be the duty of future generations—equipped with whatever tools, visions, insights, and questions we may offer them—to continue the work of re-enchantment after we are gone. A sense of re-enchantment must first animate how we teach the rising generations.

I teach religion, ethics, and philosophy across several institutions of secondary and higher education in the United States. As a doctoral student in the Study of Religion, I chose this path with the commitment to becoming a scholar-teacher of the world’s religious traditions, particularly Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic contemplative traditions. If my scholarship is concerned with the work of intellectually grappling with re-enchantment, my work as a teacher is to make the possibilities of re-enchantment intelligible and meaningful to broadly capable and diverse yet equally disquieted and existentially-thirsty audiences. Following the essential pedagogical inspiration of the Buddha’s teaching of the dharma, wisdom and insight are framed and delivered in myriad ways depending on capacity, language, and context. Each person, regardless of their capabilities, may receive the dharma; any good pedagogy is adaptable, fluid, and responsive. The re-enchanted world will only be built if we explore, consider, and teach the structures on which it may be built. This essay, too, stands at a juncture between scholarship and pedagogy, between formulating a sober intellectual diagnosis and demonstrably articulating its needs and value for a wider audience.

As a teacher of both high school and college students, I often think about the precarity of the current moment. Besides general and valid concerns of professional teachers being under resourced, under compensated, and under appreciated by students, parents, and the broader culture, teachers stand on the frontlines as translators and interpreters of an uncertain and confusing world. Teachers are generally left to their own devices in the work of molding coherent selves in a world that feels increasingly fragmented; each morning millions of teachers across the country must wake and discern how to best model, to absorptive and observant minds, how to be coherent beings in an often-incoherent world. The work of training young minds how to think, act, and be in the world, in society, in a nation, and in communities often seems an insurmountable task.

Despite the precarity, I also find hope in this moment’s potential for cultural re-enchantment. Teaching has a central and immediate role in turning these philosophical ideas into meaningful cultural, personal, and civilizational change. Teaching is a sacred vocation. The most apt image of a teacher, in my mind, is that of a fire kindler—either the tender of a simple deep-woodland campfire on a cool autumn evening or of a Zoroastrian athravan, a guardian of the temple fire. Teachers are tenders of the fire of wonder, those who guard and tend the holy fire of that which is essential for our survival in the long, cool, dark night of the modern world. Teachers are not charged with teaching students what to think, but the many ways of how one may think. As a teacher of religion, I do not see my role as that of a proselytizer seeking to convince students of a particular intellectual system or cosmological vision. Instead, I strive to create encounters that kindle their inner sense of wonder. That wonder may arise through my attempts to convey the zeal of a Sufi dhikr, the peace of moral certitude in an ethical case study, or the ungraspable clarity of insight cultivated in zazen meditation. Which tradition or experience resonates is ultimately up to the students themselves and whatever chord of longing it awakens within them. My pedagogical work, then, is the sacred art of tending wonder: inviting students to linger in the mystery and beauty of the world, and offering enough kindling for the next stage of their journey. Most importantly, our work lies in teaching students how to renew their own fuel so they may sustain their fire for the journeys that yet lie ahead long after they have left my classes.

In the work of wonder-tending, I see as essential the cultivation of a new anthropology that shifts a student’s primary focus from occupational and production-oriented ontological measures of one’s worth in the world to an ontology of a wonder, humility, and awe whose fruits are delight and joy. This calls for a multi-polar anthropology which draws on shared wisdom of the new ecumenical, multicultural, and interreligious context of Western civilization and on cross-cultural intuitions of our human capacity for transcendence and re-enchantment.4 It is an anthropology that shifts the metric upon which we build out worldview from what do you want to do? to how are you going to be?

To this end, in my work as a teacher, I have tried to shift to new variants of the questions above when I teach or mentor students, such as:

What is the quality by which you want to be known by your grandchildren and neighbors?

What kind of home do you want to inhabit when you are older?

How do you want to be?

Most of these questions indicate a subtle but necessary shift towards a new anthropological vision—from product-oriented beings to process-oriented beings, and a shift from gaining understanding to gaining wonder and its fruits of humility, delight, and openness. It is a shift from the dominant post-Enlightenment anthropology of doing, towards a re-enchanted anthropology of being.

At different institutions of secondary and higher learning, I have attempted to enact a pedagogy of re-enchantment in different ways. In this essay, I share examples and notes for an emergent pedagogical philosophy of re-enchantment. The examples highlighted here are taken from courses on (1) creativity, (2) happiness, (3) Zen Buddhism, and (4) interreligious readings of sacred texts. My work, as all our work, is necessarily partial and interdependent with the efforts of others committed to a radical reimagination of a post-Enlightenment civilization as we work in different ways—whether in governance, in therapy and healthcare, in sustainable construction, in architecture, or in other ways—to building a different world. Here, I only offer several embers of pedagogical possibility in this moment of re-enchantment.

The Vital Spark: Cultivating Integral Creativity

In a college-level class called Creativity,5 our investigation was guided by a simple yet profound question—what is creativity, what are its limits, and from where does it come? From neuroscience to philosophy to biology to religion, we spent a term together exploring various perspectives on the origins, functions, flourishing, and ends of creativity. Each week, students were tasked with at least one creative assignment which offered an opportunity to integrate free creative generation with thoughtful analytical review. Taught from January to May 2023, the course was taught during the emergence of generative AI as an accessible resource that, in hindsight, opened up radical, novel concerns that our civilization is still grappling with—in a world where robots can write poetry, what is the use of human creativity? Rather than remaining removed from the technology or disengaging, we took a bold first step by testing the early technology to see if it could, in fact, match the products of human creativity At the time, ChatGPT couldn’t generate a convincing Japanese haiku, interpret a poem by Rumi, or produce a short story that combined the authorial voices of Jorge Luise Borges and Ernest Hemingway into a strange new narrative synthesis. While the capabilities of AI tools have expanded exponentially since this course was offered, and while our once-impossible prompts now seem firmly within the realm of generative AI’s capabilities, many remain unsettled and unconvinced that the creativity of generative AI can fundamentally supplant human creative production.

Interestingly, most students in Creativity were not humanities-oriented students. They were concentrators in STEM or STEM-adjacent fields such as computer science, engineering, economics, or pre-med. In office hours, students usually spoke about their lack of personal interest in their major fields of study, but that they “had to” study what they were studying, either because of parental encouragement or because of the lure of a financially lucrative career after graduation. Such decisions are haunting many recent and current computer science concentrators in light of AI’s ascendance. In Creativity, students were ecstatic to be liberated from problem sets or papers that felt rote, and instead instructed to simply create—poems, songs, visuals, scores, portraits, riddles, koans, and much more. They found in Creativity what they had been largely denied in the studies they pursued for economic advancement—the liberation of the creative act from the demands of a product, the play of exploration without having to rush to a destination, and the joy of unexpected connections in trying new mediums of art.

Many theologians and philosophers have reflected on the human necessity for creation, arguing it is the core of our ontological hardwiring.6 Catholic theologians reflect on the human vocation as creators who mirror, in their labor and craft, of the Divine act of creation. The Sufi tradition discusses the theophanic potential of humans who mirror and enact beautification, order, and sanctification through our creative endeavors. Other traditions such as qi gong and yogic systems intuit the connection between creativity and subtle energy channels of the human body. When authentic human creation is stifled and stagnant, we become blocked, frustrated, and flustered in ways which manifest as depression, anxiety, abuse, and dismay. Without nurturing the vital spark and flow of our propensity for creation and creative inquiry, we enter into a state of fundamental fragmentation, a dis-integration which manifests in manifold experiences of anxiety, depression, and mental dis-ease.

What Creativity offered as a node of pedagogical wisdom is a reminder that the work of teaching in any subject or field necessarily begins in the invitation to exploration, play, and experimentation detached from the goals of financial, status, or career gain. Many contemporary educational systems have conflated the goals of creative, synthetic education with career training, much to our civilizational detriment. If we are to enact a collective shift to a re-enchanted anthropology, teachers must begin by encouraging a creative attitude which eventually inculcates a disposition of awe in realizing the limits of one’s personal experience in a world that is always changing, charged with mystery, and beautifully and ever becoming something more than what it currently is. This vital spark is the core of human experience, and it is a teacher’s duty, in the work of re-enchantment, to do what we can to preserve and encourage it in our students’ lives, self-discovery, and self-recovery.

Happiness and Its Many Roads: Centering Meaning and Its Making

At the secondary level, I design and teach a class that is simply called Happiness. In this class, we explore how different cultures and societies have conceived of the notion of happiness and framed the well-lived life. Like Creativity, Happiness is wildly popular among students and a choice elective. Such a class seems to offer some reprieve or hope for a rightly anxious group of students wondering what the world will be like when they are adults. Over the course of our class, students quickly learn that definitions and models of happiness or a well-lived life are not universal across time, space, and culture. We begin by considering the contingency of our contemporary positionality as twenty-first century American students living in a context of globalization and retracing our steps from the present day to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Age of Empire, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and all the way to the various civilizational streams of Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, the Arabic translation movement, and Greco-Roman philosophy that have given rise to our context. This truncated but necessary roadmap of intellectual history has a singular goal of demonstrating that we live in the context of historical contingency and that our expectations of a well-lived life are far from universal. For many students, it is a liberating opening to understanding that the structures, frameworks, and expectations that define most of their lives are not sacrosanct. We then move to an exploration of major concepts and frameworks, endeavoring a cross-cultural consideration of concepts such as the Greek eudaimonia, Buddhist dharma, Islamic fitrah, Christian vocation, Hindu sat-chit-ananda, and Japanese ikigai. Through keeping a daily gratitude journal and a weekly ikigai journal, students are encouraged to deeply consider the structures that form their sense of “living well” and to consider all the possible alternatives at this pivotal juncture in their formation.

What Happiness offers is an invitation to root our students in a more contextual understanding of our positionality that liberates and invites students to consider what it could mean to live into an anthropology of process, becoming, and being. An essential task of the wonder-tenders in the work of re-enchantment will be to remind students of the ultimate fruits of human life—a contextual and holistic conceptualization of the human person that exists beyond one’s performance, financial status, or job. Whether it’s framed as one’s ikigai, eudaimonia, dharma, or vocation, such frameworks allow students to find their greater story beyond the goals of a paycheck, a house, or a summer home in the Hamptons. Such frameworks, of course, don’t demonize or degrade the pursuit of career success and wealth, but contextualize these pursuits within an expanded network of concerns and relationships. Our teaching must be rooted in the invitation of our students to contextual, holistic, and broader perspectives.

Such efforts build, at the grassroots, the foundation of an anthropology of re-enchantment. I have already seen tangible, hopeful fruits of this pedagogical experiment. One Happiness student who was previously scheduled for a summer internship at an investment bank is now bound for a guided summer monastic retreat (likely to the horror of their parents, my apologies!), and another student has started the necessary training to be a meditation teacher as the result of their gratitude and ikigai journaling. Civilizational shifts begin in these small, personal shifts of awareness, focus, and intent. It begins with a re-orientation of one’s vision.

Dwelling in Questions, Decentering Answers: Inspiring a Wayfaring Mind

At both the secondary and college level, I have designed courses on East Asian Ways of Knowing: Zen Buddhism. The course is a survey of broader Mahayana and specifically Zen Buddhist traditions. Such a course poses a core pedagogical challenge. How does one teach Zen Buddhist epistemology—which prizes direct, lived realization unhindered by conceptualizations—within the radically different and confining structures of a course in Western academic institutions which demand examination, performance, and evaluation? This has become a concentrated adventure in venturing a way forward in light of much broader concerns surrounding disciplinary fragmentation and knowledge integration in contemporary higher education. It calls for a reckoning and has encouraged me to consider alternatives modes of evaluation, drawing on models such as the Islamic mahdarah system of Mauritania which offers more intimate models of teacher-student transmission and peer-to-peer collaborative learning or Buddhist systems of dharma transmission to measure whether or not students have reliably progressed in a course focused on cultivating the path and conditions of meditative realization.

In such classes, I give students a simple maxim: inhabit the questions; don’t seek the answers. Through introductions to various “technologies of contemplation” such as calm-abiding meditation, walking meditation, koan meditation and composition, qi gong, and zazen, students are encouraged to focus on the process of discovery, lingering to consider the unfolding nuances, textures, and layers of observation, thought, and perception emerging during the course. Introductions to Buddhist ethics and cosmology also offer helpful opportunities to introduce students to the possibilities of a re-enchanted anthropology. For example, after exploring the classic Mahayana concept of the bodhisattva, a being who chooses to remain in the cycle of reincarnation until all beings, through their service, have attained liberation, I reframe the question of “What do you want to do when you grow up?” as:

Imagine you accepted the vow of the bodhisattva. How would you exist to spread liberatory loving-kindness to all beings?

The maxim of focusing on the process rather than discerning answers can be a helpful exercise in courses beyond East Asian Ways of Knowing and is a helpful pedagogical process for opening new insights for students.

Dreaming Beyond Canon(s) and Culture(s): Towards a Dia-logos of Imaginal Horizons

I regularly design and offer college-level classes in a series titled Sacred Texts in Dialogue: Reading Interreligiously. Inspired in part by the Great Books approach to learning, these courses are devoted to teaching some of the great classics of world religious literature. Rather than teaching and reading a single text, however, we put two seminal texts into unconventional cross-cultural, interreligious conversations. We may read Rumi’s Persian Sufi Masnavi with Shantideva’s Mahayana Buddhist Way of the Bodhisattva, asking questions such as, what would Rumi make of Shantideva, or Shantideva of Rumi? What would a Sufi make of calm-abiding meditative practices or the Buddhist or Sufi practices of invocatory litanies? What might be an Islamic reading of a Buddhist text, or a Buddhist reading of an Islamic text? In other versions, we may read Dante’s Comedia in conversation with ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Valmiki’s Ramayana with Homer’s Odyssey, or the Book of Psalms and the Heart Sutra.

Courses like Sacred Texts expressly embody one of the essential tasks of the teacher—the opening and expansion of a student’s imaginal horizons. The solutions to our civilizational crises will not arise from the same structures from which the crises were born; solutions most often arise from unexpected convergences, innovative approaches, and insights deep within which emerge only from what Emily Dickinson calls new and “certain Slant[s] of light” which reveal new layers and dimensions to the challenges that face us. Sacred Texts is an exercise in innovative problem-solving through cross-cultural reading and reasoning. The work of wonder-tending calls for suggesting not only fresh answers for our students to consider but also new questions for our students to live into.

These courses emphasize imaginal dialogue. I use imaginal in an expansive way suggested by Mark Vernon in his recent Wayfare article Awake—and also found in the works of scholars such as Henry Corbin and the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi—not in the sense of something ephemeral, secondary, or distracting, but profoundly real, an exercise of visionary capability that expands realms of what we think is real or possible. The work of re-enchantment entails a reprisal and rehabilitation of this understanding of the imaginal and its many implications for new possibilities in art, politics, communal life, and beyond. Imaginal horizons in a globalized, diverse age also entails a deep commitment to dialogue as dia-logos, what Catholic theologian Raimon Panikkar calls not a dialectical duet of two logoi in debate, but a piercing or breaking through of the logos, a movement not of but through rational formulations so that something truer than either side’s conceptual scheme may emerge between the partners.7 Truth-seeking becomes an interdependent relationality rooted in partnership rather than an intellectual conquest. Such a dia-logical spirit must be at the core of the work of re-enchantment, and it is the primary project of Sacred Texts.

We see elements of this necessary expansion of imaginal horizons in the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary programs and studies at the college and graduate level. Students and educators are finding that innovative solutions can be found not only within traditional disciplinary boundaries but also at the unexplored avenues of disciplinary dialogue—where Tibetan Buddhist monks are in conversation with neuroscientists about cognitive health, Shipibo Icaro interpreters discuss plant sentience with ethnobotanists, and where physicists, musicians, and Hindu swamis consider the transformative nature and creational potential of sound, vibration, and speech. Education should be dia-logical, drawing on the vast array of resources which define our world, working towards new, richer, more colorful, more expensive conceptual horizons that can help us think about things like virtue, belonging, honor, justice, and environmental stewardship. Learning to read dia-logically allows us to learn new ways of seeing to find creative solutions in a complex, changing, world. Each new encounter becomes humbling, wondrous, and revelatory.

Inculcating Technologies of Contemplation: Teaching the Student Whole

In my senior year of high school, our English teacher tasked us with memorizing, collectively, a new line of poetry each day at the start of class. At the time, I begrudged the process and did not understand the value of rote memorization, a common pedagogical practice found in other cultural systems that has long been devalued in the West, but I still carry those poems with me today, decades later. I only now see the wisdom of this practice. Both memorization and contemplative practice are virtually absent in contemporary Western pedagogical models. A common practice that unites my four pedagogical experiments detailed above is a commitment to introducing students to experiences of ritual, routine, repetition, rhythm, and regular practice. What Michael Foucault calls “technologies of the self” can be found in many religious traditions as something I call “technologies of contemplation,” those tools which focus on inner cultivation of perception, presence, and introspection that readies students for the work of analysis, connection, dialogue, and evaluation. Whether it’s the lectio divina of Christian monastic traditions or the wird and dhikr of Sufi traditions or the darshan of Hindu traditions, technologies of contemplation are a cornerstone of inculcating an attitude of wonder.

In East Asian Ways of Knowing, students keep a daily meditation practice and journal, and in Happiness students keep a gratitude journal rooted in daily reflection. In Creativity, students engage in a daily creative exercise to mirror the artist’s daily commitment to their craft, and in Sacred Texts students memorize lines from the texts they engage dialogically. These are efforts not only to teach the whole student—to tend to both their intellectual and inner dimensions—but to teach the student whole, to offer them models and pathways for the integration of knowledge and wisdom, to work for the reintegration of a student and their perception, reflection, and intellect in a system and setting of disintegration. This reintegration is at the core of pedagogy in the work of re-enchantment.

Conclusion

The elements of an emergent, integral pedagogy of re-enchantment include (1) tending the vital spark of creative inquiry that is at the core of the learning experience; (2) shaping our curricula in light of a more holistic anthropology that orients our students to the quest for meaning rather than the attainment of an occupation; (3) encouraging students to inhabit questions, to root in process over product, and to linger in the journey rather than rush to answers, conclusions, or goals; (4) stepping outside of frameworks and canons and into a dia-logos that allows new questions, answers, and approaches to emerge organically; and (5) introducing students to the technologies of contemplation which allows for an anthropological and epistemological re-integration in a current system marked by fragmentation, incoherence, and disintegration. These, I hope, would converge in the ultimate cultivation of essential wonder—awe, humility, and hope in the understanding that there is more than meets the eye, and that beauty and virtue remain within our grasp despite the disintegration, incoherence, and fragmentation which seems to surround us.

I often remind my students that there is nothing particularly remarkable about being a teacher. Each of us is and will be a teacher, even if some do it in ways that are more structured and offer a means of sustenance. Each of us is called to the vocation of teaching, of tending the sacred fires of wonder, and of re-enchantment. At some point, and more likely at many points, we serve as teachers for others. We teach our children, our friends, our spouses, our parents, our colleagues, and perhaps most beautifully, utter strangers in unexpected moments—a door held open despite the rush of the day, a soft smile in a grocery store line that breaks through the weariness, a warm touch of reassurance on the palm. Fire asks little more than a thin thread of kindling for it to blaze; hope asks little more than a glimmer of endurance and persistence. I remind my students that if we all commit in ways great and small to the vocation of wonder-tending, then the whole world, soon enough, will blaze with edifying radiance. From the embers of these intuitions and efforts, a great blaze may emerge.

Echoing Davis’ sober pronouncement once again: things, somewhere, have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. We seemingly teeter on a precipice and a descent into chaos. We can choose to linger in our despair and incoherence and brace for impact and collapse. Alternatively, we can stoke the embers of those intuitions that wonder promises us–that something far greater awaits us in the possibility of re-enchantment. I am hopeful that teachers have an essential role to play in this moment, even if we go unrecognized and uncelebrated by dominant cultural matrices. Many times over from Rome to Baghdad to Alexandria and beyond, worlds have ended, and many more times over, worlds have been rebuilt. At each juncture, humans have survived, persisted, and flourished. I take heart in the invitation and opportunity for re-enchantment, and the ways we may be able to enact this shift together, being as trickling droplets of water falling on sturdy rock bed, shaping, with each small act of wonder-tending a path for living waters to flow and nourish the valleys below and beyond, even if such erosions and transformations remain imperceptible to us in this moment, within the limited gaze of this short, precious, and wondrous life.

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Peter Dziedzic is a PhD candidate in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at Harvard University, where he is finishing his dissertation on Kashmiri and Persian Sufi poetry. He is also working on a comparative study of walking pilgrimages around the world. He is currently an instructor in Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and has recently served as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Study of Religion at Harvard University and as a professor in Religious and Islamic World Studies at DePaul University.

Art by Karl Wiener. 1901-1949.

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Why do so many people in modern societies feel not at home in the world? How have they become so alienated from one another, the natural environment, and even themselves?

In his ambitious new book, Ian Marcus Corbin engages the fundamental questions surrounding friendship with oneself, one’s family, friends, community, nation, and species.

Joining Ian for a wide-ranging conversation about the themes of his book will be Harvard Divinity School researcher Russell Powell and Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis.

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EARLY REVIEWS

“In his densely argued debut book, philosopher Corbin draws on cultural anthropology, cognitive science, economic history, literature, and philosophy to explore themes of belonging, loneliness, and alienation. . . . An erudite analysis of contemporary angst.”―Kirkus Reviews

“Ian Marcus Corbin’s book is a brilliantly eloquent plea, at once rigorously argued and ambitiously visionary, for the lost habits of attention, belonging, gratitude, and humility. Corbin calls these various habits ‘world-tending,’ and he makes a vivid case that if we do not begin this task now, there may be no meaningful world left to tend. A passionate and necessary book.”―James Wood, author of How Fiction Works

“Ian Marcus Corbin has written a searching, erudite, and provocative meditation on―well, what it means to be human. He insists that we return to fundamental questions: What sort of world are we living in, and how should our politics and morality align with that world? For his part, Corbin contends that this is a world where the everyday beauty and divinity of the cosmos―and of human beings―must be our starting point.”―Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University

“To Arrive Where We Started is a deeply thoughtful examination of the human search for home. Ian Marcus Corbin argues that the need to feel at home in the world is not a sentimental longing but a condition of agency itself. By tracing how modern ideas of the self have eroded our ability to inhabit a shared world, he offers a powerful diagnosis of contemporary alienation. Corbin’s call to place belonging and participation back at the center of our self-understanding poses a profound and timely challenge to the modern imagination.”―Sean Dorrance Kelly, coauthor of All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“This is a fascinating and beautifully crafted account of the human quest for home and belonging. Given the increasing levels of loneliness, alienation, and anomie in the US, Europe, and beyond, this is a very significant intellectual intervention.”―Adrian Pabst, University of Kent

“Social philosophers are those who, in any society, ask: ‘What is it to flourish? And how can we do so?’ Ian Corbin is a social philosopher for twenty-first-century America. His answers are well worth attending to.”―George Scialabba, author of The Sealed Envelope and Only a Voice

PARTICIPANTS

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on faculty at Harvard Medical School and founding director of Harvard’s Public Culture Project. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Russell C. Powell is Research Associate for the Transcendentalism Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He has held teaching positions at Boston College, Amherst College, and Princeton University. Russell is currently completing a book manuscript focused on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s relevance to modern ecological thought, particularly as an architect of the concept of “nature” and its religious and political resonances in the United States. He is also an associate editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, & Culture and sits on the advisory board of the Forum on Religion & Ecology at Yale University.

Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare Magazine. He is also the host of the podcasts Article 13, Writ Large, and Ministry of Ideas. He is the recipient of two John Templeton Foundation grants. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and Harvard Divinity School and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his wife, Mariya and their three children.

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