"Sharpen My Shovel"

Melissa Inouye’s “Making Zion” as a Personal Apologetics of Digging In (2019)

This post is part of a collaborative series between Wayfare and Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, which is available for pre-order here (use S26UIP for a 30% discount!).

In the biographical sketch for “Making Zion,” Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye (1979–2024) is introduced as “a self-described bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar.”¹ With a BA and PhD from Harvard University, Inouye was a senior lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Auckland, with a focus on modern China and global Christianity at the time of this speech. She also contributed to Latter-day Saint intellectual conversations through her position as a historian at the Church History Library and as a leader in the Global Mormon Studies Research Network, with numerous published essays, interviews, and talks, two books for general audiences, and a coedited volume with Kate Holbrook of essays by Latter-day Saint woman scholars, Every Needful Thing.

“Making Zion” was given at Brigham Young University in conjunction with the publication of Inouye’s book Crossings, part of the Living Faith Book Series produced by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Living Faith books are meant to provide “Latter-day Saint young adults and their mentors nourishing traveling companions on their journeys of faith.”² In the series, scholars integrate their academic, personal, and spiritual perspectives, showcasing how being an intellectual Latter-day Saint “is a vocation worthy of serious reflection and joyful effort.”³ In this way, the Living Faith Series is part of a larger tradition of Latter-day Saint “personal apologetics” that includes anthologies such as A Thoughtful Faith⁴ as well as single-author books like Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel⁵ and The Faith of a Scientist.⁶ Rather than using rational or theological arguments to justify a faith tradition (i.e., why this should work for everyone), this type of apologetics focuses instead on personal experiences of faith (i.e., why this works for me).

Personal apologetics is one response to the growing number of young Latter-day Saints leaving the faith. Data from 2016, three years prior to Inouye’s address, show that close to 50 percent of millennial (born after 1981) American Latter-day Saints were no longer affiliated with the Church,⁷ a trend consistent with young Americans’ general disaffection from organized religion. Inouye frames her talk as a response to a young Latter-day Saint woman who is unsure whether she wants to continue attending a church that she sees as giving unequal treatment across gender and sexual identities. This concern reflects a larger cultural movement toward equity for women and LGBTQ+ people, including the legalization of gay marriage in the United States in 2015 and the #MeToo movement of 2018. Inouye chooses to address this young woman’s concern in a speech at BYU, a place where many young Latter-day Saints and their mentors likely share this and similar questions. “Making Zion” was also given at a turbulent personal moment. As Inouye shares, she had learned in the week just prior to her talk that her colon cancer—the reason she wrote Crossings as a memoir of faith for her young children—was no longer in remission. Throughout “Making Zion,” Inouye interweaves the global with the personal, using fresh and animating analogies to excavate underlying assumptions and give her audience new perspectives on the life of faith.

Instead of using the typical logic of conversations about the Church’s flaws, Inouye names and undermines this logic, changing the terms of the conversation. Inouye responds to the young woman’s assertion that “the gender and sexuality issues are deal breakers,” without excuses or critiques. Instead, she questions the logic of deal breaking itself. To Inouye, deal breaking is also the logic of those who dismiss the young woman as overly critical, believing that “pointing out ways in which we [as a Church] fall short breaks the deal.” Undermining the logic of deal breaking begs additional questions that Inouye does not address, such as if there should be any deal breakers in religious practice or where to draw personal boundaries. Instead, Inouye comments “that life is full of messy contradictions and that sometimes embracing them is the most productive way forward,” asserting that noticing inequality in the Church does not exclude engaged participation.

Inouye also flips the logic of typical Church conversations by directly addressing patriarchy. This word can cause consternation in many Latter-day Saint spaces, with some leaders historically affirming patriarchy as God’s way of governing⁸ and others explaining that the use of patriarchy in a church context is distinct from usage elsewhere,⁹ distancing the Church from feminist critiques. In contrast, Inouye uses the term in its mainstream, feminist form, but asserts that the Church is wholly unexceptional in its patriarchal structure, which it shares with the majority of religions, governments, cultures, and even gourmet cooking. As she says, “Though some spots are better than others, I would not escape patriarchy by quitting my job, moving countries, or leaving the Church.”¹⁰ This assertion echoes a conclusion from Verlyne Nzojibwami’s qualitative study of thirteen Latter-day Saint feminists that “there is no haven on either side of the fence. Instead, a private space is created in between the two opposing sides.”¹¹ For Inouye, this “private space” can be made within the Church, questioning the tacit assumption that leaving the Church would free her (and her audience) from gender inequality.

In each section of her talk, Inouye uses her own lived experiences alongside global history to contextualize the challenges of life and faith. She points out the universality of death and patriarchy across history but also discusses her own cancer, her mother’s death, and losing her hair at age twenty-nine. By continuously zooming in on individual experience and out to “most of humanity for thousands of years,” Inouye encourages her audience to see personal things with a global, transhistorical perspective. She reminds her listeners that Latter-day Saints “are a tiny 0.02% minority of God’s children,” a fact that is easy to forget at BYU. To Inouye, this global perspective reveals a hidden strength: “We are weird and small enough to really try to be sister and brother to each other.” Once again, Inouye has changed the terms of the conversation, suggesting that personal efforts can address global issues, just as global perspectives can shed new light on personal problems.

Inouye also uses fresh and humorous analogies to change her audience’s perspective. In a humorous story about her farmer grandfather, Inouye invites her audience to consider that life is, in part, about choosing which ditches you want to dig. Inouye says, “Since I see no feasible way to opt out [of patriarchy], I have decided instead to dig in—to sharpen my shovel and get to work.” This analogy gives Inouye a tool that brings the Latter-day Saint work ethic to a novel application, expanding listeners’ thinking.¹² Near the end of the talk, she speaks “to my young fellow Latter-day Saints, . . . please consider your tremendous power to lead us where we need to go,” inviting them to join her in the ditches of the Church. This invitation may be unconvincing to young people who worry these ditches will not make much headway. But by giving her audience the analogy of ditchdigging, Inouye shifts the conversation about faith and church membership from the existential to the everyday work of improvement.

In the most irreverent analogy of her speech, Inouye quotes her uncle, Charles Shirō Inouye, who said, “Mormons are like manure. If you heap them all up in a pile together, they just stink. But if you spread them around, they can do a lot of good.” In the same vein, Inouye comments that Jesus called his disciples to be salt and yeast, “things that are horrible in concentration, indispensable in dissolution.” Inouye’s use of humorous analogies allows her to build empathy and trust with her audience, making them more likely to listen to her perspective.¹³ In her creative analogies, Inouye echoes not only Jesus but also other Latter-day Saint leaders like Dieter F. Uchtdorf and Chieko N. Okazaki, who use fresh analogies with lived experience in a global church.¹⁴ “Making Zion” provides a personal apologetics for remaining a part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rooted in the faith’s tradition of broad visions and pioneer spirit. Inouye’s title is a telling insight into her uniquely Latter-day Saint approach to this topic—Zion will not happen by an act of God; it must be made by us. Inouye contends, “The worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves, and that makes no difference for good in the lives of others.” This work involves “living with contradictions,” an attitude that echoes the claim of the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith: “By proving contrarieties truth is made manifest.”¹⁵ The Latter-day Saint project is full to the brim with contraries:¹⁶ manure and theodicies, earth and sky. Following her pioneer ancestors, Inouye digs ditches into thorny issues, like patriarchy and disaffection, suggesting that we, the modern Church, not only make Zion, but we can make it anew.

Making Zion (2019)

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye¹⁷

[. . .]

About a year ago I had a chat with a young woman who was deciding where to go to college. She had been accepted by a number of outstanding universities and academic programs around the country. She had a bright future ahead of her, but she wasn’t sure whether that future included ongoing practice in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She laid out all of her pressing questions.

I took notes. I’m going to share an excerpt from what she said with regard to women’s issues and LGBTQ issues within the Church. Whatever your own position on these sensitive topics, can I ask you to listen gently, with an open mind, accepting that these are her sincere, heartfelt questions? Don’t worry about responding. Just see if you can hear her.

How can I be a member of a church that doesn’t treat women equally compared to men, and that asks LGBTQ people to never date, seek loving companionship, or marry and have children? Didn’t Christ command us to treat others the way we would want to be treated?

I’ve studied history. I understand how structural inequality works, and what it looks like. Currently, the church looks like just another of the many conservative religious institutions that are part of the long human history of patriarchy and discrimination. Sure, I like the idea of “eternal families.” But when the promise of “eternal families” comes with treating men and women differently, and denying LGBTQ people love and the opportunity to start their own families, people like many of my friends and me, are inclined to say: No thanks. The gender and sexuality issues are deal breakers.

She expressed these concerns with eloquence and passion. In addition to concerns about women’s and LGBTQ issues, she also cited well-documented instances of racism and abuse within a Church context. As I listened, I could feel that these questions came from a place of integrity, a belief in the worth of each individual soul, and a desire to follow the Savior’s fearless example. She wasn’t looking for excuses to be a slacker or lead a dissipated life. She wanted to love others as Jesus loved, to stand for truth and righteousness, to bring as many people as possible into the gospel fold. If you or someone you love and respect has ever expressed any of these concerns she raised, can you please raise your hand?

I’ve been thinking about her questions for some time. Many of them have long dwelt in my heart. But I was struck by the way she asked them—as a seventeen-year-old, with fire in her eyes, with a clear understanding of the tensions that they generated in her life and worldview and personal relationships. These concerns are pressing to many within the rising generations of Latter-day Saints—if not you yourself, then perhaps your loved one or your friend.

What is also pressing is a desire for action. Today it is common for people to boycott restaurants or corporations because of political views or social policies associated with them, or to hold a “walkout” as a form of protest. In such an environment, it can seem inexcusable to many to remain within an organization that excludes women from the chain of organizational leadership, or compels LGBTQ people to make excruciating choices to remain in full fellowship, or that has a history that includes racist teachings and policies, or that has a track record of cases of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

So now some of you are looking at me and wondering, “Is she going to excuse this and say, ‘Just focus on the positive, read your scriptures, and pray?’ If she sees the contradictions I see, how can she stay?” Or, others are looking at me and wondering, “Why is she so critical? If she sees contradictions in the Church’s structure or policies or history, why doesn’t she just go somewhere else?”

I want you to notice that both of these positions are closely related. They’re based on the same premise that some things are deal breakers. Either the Church is supposed to be true and good, and falling short of truth or goodness breaks this deal, or faithful church members are supposed to believe that the Church is true and good, and pointing out ways in which we fall short breaks this deal. I have many friends and family members who have left the Church because they felt they couldn’t reconcile their moral values with our policies and culture. I have many friends and family members who will never leave the Church because their past experiences have given them a sense of certainty that wherever the Church and its leaders are at any given time is where they want to be (and where others should be).

How we come to our worldviews depends heavily on our own personal experiences and the environments in which we live. My own position—the basic set of assumptions that shape my faith and worldview—is different from the two “deal-breaking” positions I just described. My position is that life is full of messy contradictions and that sometimes embracing them is the most productive way forward. This worldview is based on my experience as a scholar, returned missionary, athlete, mother, and cancer patient. It is based on my family background, and my relationships with people in places like Orange County, California; Taiwan; Auckland; and Gunnison, Utah.

If you don’t mind, in the remainder of the talk I’ll share this position with you, with an understanding that even within the body of committed Latter-day Saints there are diverse experiences, values, and concerns. In today’s audience, there are also a number of people who are not Latter-day Saints, but who are people of strong faith, intellect, and heart.¹⁸ All of us live in a world of bewildering contradictions. Even if our worldviews don’t completely align, I hope that one or two of my perspectives may be useful to you in some way.

I first drafted this talk on an early morning train from Bordeaux to Paris in March, on my way back home from a scholarly conference. As I watched the sun come up over the barren fields and warm the cold earth, three sentences popped into my head that seemed to usefully triangulate my life philosophy at this point in time. Here they are:

Death is not the worst thing.

Patriarchy is not the worst thing.

Baldness is not the worst thing.

By “baldness,” I don’t mean just having no hair, but I mean imperfections, loss, scars, damage, and other conditions that we acquire as life takes its toll. I don’t just mean things that are easily visible, like wrinkles, but things that come to us in life that make us feel less secure, less confident, less buoyant or hopeful.

Death, patriarchy, baldness—these three are symbols of the suffering, imbalance, and indignity of the fallen world in which, Latter-day Saints believe, we chose to dwell. They are features of human experience in every place and time. Our Heavenly Parents do not rejoice in untimely death, or revel in unfairness, or gleefully inflict damage on their beloved children. But they have prepared for us a world in which the laws of nature take their course, in which imperfect individuals make assumptions and exercise agency, in which accidents happen. The whole point of life is to encounter opposition, to learn to discern good and evil, and to exercise the divine nature within us by following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

Therefore, from this perspective, what is the worst thing?

The worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves and that makes no difference for good in the lives of others.

Let’s talk about death. All of us are dying. Some of us will finish dying sooner. Others will finish dying later. I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017, did a round of treatments, went into remission, and last week was told by my doctors that the cancer was likely recurring. Therefore, I will be thrilled if I live to see my credit card expire in March 2023. The reason I’m here on the BYU campus today is because I wrote a book about my life, titled Crossings (with a very long subtitle). I began to write Crossings shortly after my diagnosis, because I was not sure whether I would live long enough to talk to my young children about my faith. At the time they were eleven, nine, seven, and five. This is not exactly the age for complex, nuanced discussions about the meaning of life. The weeks between my diagnosis and my surgery were the darkest period of my life, as I contemplated the possibility that my time for influencing my children and being with my husband was coming to an end.

During this time, the thought of death accompanied my every action. As I dropped a batch of library books on robots into the return slot, or watched as my stir-fried green beans and onions with lemon and soy sauce disappeared at the dinner table, I thought about the fleetingness of the many acts that constitute parenthood. In themselves, they are so completely unmonumental. Sure, you create the kid’s body out of a single cell, so that’s something that proves you were there, but so many things—the new diapers, the milk from the breast, the words of stories, the trips to the museum—simply go in and out, in and out, delivered and erased on the daily tide. And then they are gone, leaving no visible marker that says: Your mother was here. She loved you.

I wondered whether I would live long enough for my youngest child, nicknamed the Shoot and sometimes the Hamburger, to have one or two strong memories of me. Would he know “what Mama would say” or “what Mama would do”?

In addition to worrying about my kids, I also worried about myself. I knew what cancer could do because of my mother’s experience. My mother was a gracious, lively woman whose small stature concealed fierce determination. In 2008, she passed away due to a rare cancer of the bile duct. She had been in terrible pain for several months, pain so terrible that the strongest opioids could only take off the edge but never take it away. The pain had made her unable to eat and unable to sleep. Her frame became skeletal and her face acquired a permanent pinched, grim expression. I wondered: Will I suffer like that too? Will I have to be brave, like that? Morbid thoughts flickered in and out of my daily conversations. A couple of colleagues asked me if I could advise a doctoral student coming next year. I responded, cc’ing everyone, “No problem, as long as I’m still alive then!” Radio silence. I now realize that was an awkward and unprofessional thing to say. Cancer: There’s a learning curve!

Let’s talk about patriarchy, by which I mean a system of men officially in charge, men at the forefront, men as the primary subjects, symbols, actors, and authorities. Patriarchy has been the dominant modus operandi for most of humanity for thousands of years. It is everywhere—in government, in scholarship, in art, in gourmet cooking, in the great cathedral of Notre Dame. It is in the Buddhist Vimalakirti Sutra, the Hebrew Pentateuch, the Koran, the Hindu Ramayana, the Pauline epistles, the Book of Mormon. It’s a feature of religious organization at the top levels of the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, Tibetan Buddhism, East Asian Buddhism, our Church. It’s an element of my family history on both my mother’s and my father’s side—my beloved family that I love, that bands together with such fierce loyalty, that is, in my eyes, the awesomest family in the world.

We have a famous story in the Inouye family. My grandparents, Charles and Bessie Inouye, were farmers in Gunnison, Utah, and their children spent all their time working on the farm. One day Grandpa and his high-school-aged sons were out digging in a ditch. My father remembers standing up to his knees in thick, oozy mud. Clouds of mosquitoes were swarming around, biting every exposed surface. Grandpa’s timing was perfect. He said, “Boys, if you don’t get an education, you can look forward to this for the rest of your lives.” It made a deep impression. All of Grandma and Grandpa’s children went on to college, most of them here at BYU, and on to graduate or professional school. Two decided to go to school indefinitely, that is, become university professors. One, Charles Shirō Inouye, is a professor of Japanese literature at Tufts University in Boston. Another, Dillon Kazuyuki Inouye, was a professor of instructional learning technology here at BYU until he passed away in 2008.

That day in the ditch, Grandpa, himself a graduate of Stanford University, wasn’t saying that if you get an education, you’ll never have to work, or get dirty, or that one should always avoid digging ditches. I think he was saying that education gives people more power to choose which ditches they want to dig.

Today, in my work as a professional scholar, I dig particular sorts of ditches. In my research on Chinese history and global religious movements, I plow through texts, line by line. I delve into historical sources like newspapers, organizational records, and religious teachings, seeking to uncover the lives of ordinary people in another place and time. I also step back to look for the big picture.

When one looks at the big picture of all human experience, everywhere, one finds that just as most people’s eyes are brown, and most people’s hair is black, most people’s experience within familial and other social structures is shaped by patriarchy.

I know that there are some spaces in the world, such as Indigenous cultures that are traditionally matriarchal, or perhaps some corners of the internet, that are “patriarchy-free,” by which I mean that in these spaces, patriarchal assumptions, actions, or organization are entirely absent. However, the spaces where I live my life, such as all the universities I’ve ever taught at, New Zealand society, American society, Chinese society, Christian religious traditions, social media networks, my beloved Church, and my beloved family’s history, are not patriarchy-free. Though some spots are better than others, I would not escape patriarchy by quitting my job, moving countries, or leaving the Church.

To clarify, by using the term “patriarchy-free” I am not seeking to trivialize the negative experiences of women and men who have been harmed by patriarchal practices and assumptions—women who have been ignored, abused, or dominated, men whose assumptions that they were inherently more important led them to ignore, abuse, or dominate women, have harmed their families and stunted their spiritual growth.

I am saying that patriarchal systems are rooted throughout the worlds in which I want to live, and since I see no feasible way to opt out, I have decided instead to dig in—to sharpen my shovel and get to work. The challenge of bringing to pass, in my worlds, the Book of Mormon teaching that “all are alike unto God” is one of the ditches I have chosen to dig.¹⁹

Regarding baldness: You’re probably wondering why I don’t have hair. No, it’s not because of the chemo. The major effect of chemo for me was that I felt the overwhelming urge to watch all of the British history–related shows on Netflix, from all seasons of Downton Abbey to documentaries on Henry the VIII’s residence, including his velvet-covered toilet seat (which sounds so inadvisable). Anyway, until the age of twenty-nine, I had long, thick black hair—until, inexplicably, it just fell out. At first it was really hard. I felt like everybody was looking at me. Employees in stores, flight attendants on airplanes, frequently called me “sir.” It was very humbling. I began to realize that I had no right to be prideful or to judge people based on their appearance. I was, after all, the bald woman in the room.

I would definitely love to have hair again, but losing it taught me a lesson. I learned that loss makes us both vulnerable and strong. We lose things that are dear to us, that make us beautiful or happy or whole. Sometimes this loss is readily apparent, but sometimes it isn’t. Losing my hair was the first time in my adult life I really remember feeling dependent on the kindness and graciousness of others. I had always been a competitive person—a Harvard graduate, a marathoner—but now, I felt vulnerable, dependent on others to be kind to me. This vulnerability helped me better understand and accept the vulnerability in others. In this way, as it says near the end of the Book of Mormon in the Book of Ether, 12:27, our weakness becomes a strength.

So I’ve come to a sort of understanding with death, patriarchy, and baldness, which is to say that I’ve come to accept and even appreciate the imperfection of human existence. [. . .]

[. . .]

Similarly, the more I learn about our Church history and our governing structures, the more clearly I see that the Church as it’s currently constituted has never been the best of all possible worlds. As Elder Uchtdorf has said, the Restoration is ongoing. At the same time, the more I think about the Church today, the more clearly I see that it has something to offer me and that the Latter-day Saints have something to offer the world.

What I see the Church offering me is the opportunity to learn to follow Christ and participate in the redeeming processes of error, repentance, and growth by engaging with my sisters and brothers in the gospel. It is the opportunity to think globally and act locally, to think locally and act globally. These networks of human bonds and collective action are as close at hand as my own home and neighborhood, and as far flung as the entire world. That is cool. We, the Latter-day Saints, are weird and small enough to really try to be sister and brother to each other, in our diverse and often contradictory circumstances around the world.

[. . .]

If we surround ourselves with only those who agree with us and admire us, creating an insular Latter-day-Saint-land, and forget that we are a tiny 0.02% minority of God’s children, we risk creating an artificial environment in which contradiction, tension, and discomfort are seen as foreign. This is like digging in a sandbox, where there are just uniform grains of sand. It’s easy and it’s clean, and children like to do it. But it is not fertile soil, and it does not hold water. By contrast, the native ecosystem that our Heavenly Mother and Father created for their children was meant to be muddy, full of diverse elements and microorganisms, and frequently a bit wretched.

This reminds me of something Uncle Charles said to me in college. Uncle Charles (Gunnison farm boy, professor, poet, and Latter-day Saint) told me, “Mormons are like manure. If you heap them all up in a pile together, they just stink. But if you spread them around, they can do a lot of good.”

In the scriptures, Jesus didn’t exactly say his disciples were manure, but he similarly used metaphors that described things that are horrible in concentration, indispensable in dissolution. He said in Matthew 5:13: “You are the salt of the earth.” He said in Matthew 13:33: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.”

As General Relief Society Counselor Sharon Eubank taught in April general conference, Jesus made great efforts to reach out to people outside the circle of social privilege and religious orthodoxy: “lepers, tax collectors, children, Galileans, harlots, women, Pharisees, sinners, Samaritans, widows, Roman soldiers, adulterers, the ritually unclean.”²⁰ These associations made him vulnerable to criticism from the community of those who considered themselves righteous, proper, and mainstream, and eventually contributed to his death.

[. . .]

Therefore:

Death

Patriarchy

Baldness

These are not the worst things. They are features of where I live, but they do not define me or my work as I dig the ditches of life.

In a similar manner, my faith as a Latter-day Saint is not defined entirely by our mistakes, our imbalance, and our weakness. These surely exist, because we are a living community of people seeking God together. My faith as a Latter-day Saint encompasses both the deep flaws and the deep beauty of such a collective endeavor.

[. . .]

And, to my young fellow Latter-day Saints, who are troubled by the ways in which our Church institutions or culture sometimes fall short of our highest ideals, I say: Please consider your tremendous power to lead us where we need to go. You are the future of our Church. You are who we may become. You may find that God will consecrate these struggles for your good, and for ours. As a people, where would we be without fearless questions and a fierce will to press on toward Zion over bogs and rivers and mountains? There are real hazards to undertaking a messy spiritual journey in the company of so many others, as Latter-day Saints do. But for me it is a rich life, a consequential life, a life worth living.

Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be 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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Catie Nielson is a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is also active in Mormon Studies, where her primary interest is in materialism and its relationship to the broader philosophical tradition.

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.

1. Melissa Inouye, “Making Zion,” July 2, 2019, Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, https://mi.byu.edu/video-melissa-inouye-making-zion/.

2. “Living Faith Guidelines for Authors: Living Faith Book Series,” Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, accessed March 30, 2024, https://mi.byu.edu/livingfaith.

3. “Living Faith Guidelines for Authors.”

4. Philip L. Barlow, ed. A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars (Canon Press, 1986).

5. Eugene England, Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel: Personal Essays on Mormon Experience (Mormon Arts and Letters, 1986).

6. Henry Eyring, The Faith of a Scientist (Deseret Book, 1989).

7. General Social Survey data from Darren E. Sherkat, Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans’ Shifting Religious Identities (New York University Press, 2014), updated to include 2016 data in Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford University Press, 2019).

8. See, for example, Spencer W. Kimball, Conference Report, April 1973, 151; Ensign, July 1973, 15; Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine, 5th ed. (1939), 286–88.

9. Barbara Morgan Gardner, The Priesthood Power of Women: In the Temple, Church, and Family (Deseret Book, 2019).

10. For further discussion of the hegemony of patriarchy beyond organized religion, see Ashley F. Miller, “The Non-religious Patriarchy: Why Losing Religion Has Not Meant Losing White Male Dominance,” CrossCurrents 63, no. 2 (2013): 211–26, https://doi.org/10.1353/cro.2013.a783310.

11. Verlyne Nzojibwami, “Creating Space: How Mormon Women Reconcile Their Feminist Attitudes Within a Patriarchal Religion” (master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 2009), 80.

12. For a psychological exploration of why novel analogies are more successful than conventional ones, see Dedre Gentner, Brian F. Bowdle, Phillip Wolff, and Consuelo Boronat, “Metaphor Is Like Analogy,” In The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, ed. Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (MIT Press, 2001), 199–253, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1251.003.0010.

13. Support for this argument comes from Chris A. Kramer, “Argumentation, Metaphor, and Analogy: It’s Like Something Else,” Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 33, no. 2 (2024): 160–83, https://doi.org/10.5840/inquiryct202312137.

14. See, for example, Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Forget Me Not,” October 2011, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2011/10/forget-me-not; Chieko N. Okazaki, “Baskets and Bottles,” April 1996, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1996/04/baskets-and-bottles; Chieko N. Okazaki, “Raised in Hope,” October 1996, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1996/10/raised-in-hope.

15. “Introduction to History, 1838–1856 (Manuscript History of the Church),” vol. F-1 [1 May 1844–8 August 1844], The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-f-1-1-may-1844-8-august-1844/1. The more familiar use of the word “contraries” instead of “contrarieties” comes from B. H. Roberts, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, vol. 6 (Deseret News, 1902), 428.

16. See also Terryl Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007).

17. Melissa Inouye, “Making Zion.”

18. This sentence was a later addition and not included in the original speech.

19. 2 Nephi 26:33.

20. Sharon Eubank, “Christ: The Light That Shines in the Darkness,” The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, April 2019, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/04/42eubank.