"Weaned from Milk"

Agency and Authority in Francine Bennion’s “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” (1986)

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Francine Russell Bennion (1935–2024) delivered “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” at the 1986 Brigham Young University Women’s Conference in Provo, Utah. Bennion spoke from both an academic and religious background: In addition to teaching university courses for thirty years, she had served on the general boards of both the Young Women and Relief Society programs. Bennion consistently united faith and intellect in her contributions to Church curriculum committees, Relief Society workshops on depression, and the foundation of the Women’s Research Institute at BYU.¹ Her “Theology of Suffering” is another fusion of these commitments. It is unapologetically cerebral, with detailed discussions of both scripture and science. It is also a deeply faithful testimony of the power and possibility of Latter-day Saint doctrine.

This fusion is particularly notable in its social and intellectual context. In 1986, women were not yet included as regular speakers in main sessions of the Church’s general conference, and the BYU Women’s Conference was only a decade old. It had been a tumultuous decade. Church leaders’ opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the subsequent backlash had raged throughout the Church, prompting a resurgence of Latter-day Saint feminism and a retrenchment against it.² (BYU Women’s Conference in fact began during the contentious ERA heyday of International Women’s Year.) Forums like BYU Women’s Conference, which featured “inspirational and practical sessions” for thousands of women, were important spaces for navigating what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint woman in changing times.³

At the same time, Church leaders were emphasizing doctrinal uniformity while putting heavy pressure on intellectuals who seemed to criticize the Church.⁴ The first half of the 1980s saw Apostles remind people to defer to Church leaders in activities ranging from academic research⁵ to forming personal relationships with Christ.⁶ Rarely had the Latter-day Saint ethos of preferring “prophetic over intellectual authority, obedience over questioning, faith over doubt, humility over intellectual pride, communal loyalty over independent thought, and intuition and spiritual promptings over unaided reason” been stressed as strongly.⁷

Bennion had seen this tumult up close: She had taught at BYU since 1961 and served on the Relief Society board with Barbara Smith, who frequently acted as the Church’s spokesperson against the ERA. Against this backdrop, Bennion’s speech can be read as a distinctive and potentially radical statement about the capacities and responsibilities of Latter-day Saint women. In an era when theology was rarely discussed, and the word itself was sometimes even used pejoratively,⁸ “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” stands out.

Her central theme is agency. In Latter-day Saint doctrine, learning to exercise agency is a fundamental aim of mortal life. Bennion argues that this explains the existence of suffering alongside a loving God. It also generates an imperative for each person to take responsibility for their beliefs and do theology for themselves. Bennion criticizes Latter-day Saints for their tendency to, as she memorably puts it, “shroud [themselves] helplessly in a crazy quilt stitched haphazardly from Old Testament theology . . . and LDS doctrine embroidered on top.” Exercising agency instead requires confronting the tensions in religious tradition and lived experience.

Bennion offers a two-pronged argument about theological substance and method that is in itself a rich contribution to Latter-day Saint thought. But her speech is also remarkable for its deft integration of content and form. Bennion uses eloquent language to practice precisely what she preaches. In her use of imagery, narrative, and quotation, she breaks from familiar rhetorical traditions and takes responsibility for her own conclusions. Finally, she invites her audience to do the same.

An immediately striking feature of Bennion’s rhetoric is her vivid language. Compare her presentation of the problem of suffering to twentieth-century philosopher J. L. Mackie’s. Mackie writes: “God is omnipotent. God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false.”⁹ Bennion’s reality, however, is not the sanitized, distant world of propositions. In addition to citing statistics about global poverty, Bennion uses examples that center suffering in the individuals who experience it: “the child lying in a gutter in India, the woman crawling across the Ethiopian desert to find a weed to eat, . . . the child sexually abused or scarred for life, or the astronaut who is blown up and leaves a family motherless or fatherless.” Bennion asks her listeners to sit with sufferers, reading at length from the Bible or Dorothy Bramhall’s grief- and joy-filled diary. She does not flinch from the problem, even as she offers her solution. She writes, “Christ’s atonement makes it possible for us to go through the meeting of reality, the falling, the hungering, the screaming, the crawling on the floor, the being disfigured and scarred for life psychologically or physically, and still survive and transcend it.” The litany of striking images makes the reality of suffering overwhelming, even as it carries listeners toward the hopeful possibility of redemption.

While the rhetorical function of examples is often simply to illustrate an argument, Bennion goes further. Her imagery is her argument: The lived force of the problem of suffering requires a comprehensive theological response. Good theology must satisfy both the mind and the heart.¹⁰ She does not use vivid language for shock value but to present her audience with the problem in a way that provides resources for them to evaluate her proposal. She positions them to make theological choices for themselves.

Throughout her speech, Bennion is sensitive to her female audience, though she does not discuss womanhood directly (a notable omission in its own right). Speaking to women with enough leisure time to attend a conference, Bennion knows she is not addressing those experiencing starvation or medical deprivation. She takes care to make this distant suffering present to them, but she also uses examples that sit closer to her hearers’ hearts. She speaks of domestic violence, loss of children, and cancer. In her metaphors, theological work is women’s work: She describes agency using Isaiah’s metaphor of weaning from breastfeeding and theology itself as the traditionally feminine activity of quilting.¹¹ Her central scriptural example of suffering is Jephthah sacrificing his daughter, to which she asks, “What of Jephthah’s wife, who isn’t even mentioned?” Bennion reminds her audience that the problems theology grapples with are also women’s problems. Latter-day Saint doctrine needs to have answers for women.

Just as Bennion’s imagery makes vivid the problem of suffering, her engagement with other sources makes vivid the problem of building a comprehensive theology. Bennion refuses to allow her audience to look away from the difficulties within their own religious tradition: She selects a series of scriptures that seem to contradict one another and reads the devastating story of Jephthah’s daughter in full. This is a departure from the familiar use of scripture in Latter-day Saint contexts, which is generally to provide argumentative support or to elucidate divine promises.¹² Bennion also obstructs unquestioning acceptance of tradition in her choice of which sources to omit. There are no references to the current prophet or other male Church leaders. As I have written elsewhere, quoting religious authorities is a rhetorical staple of Latter-day Saint oratory in general conference.¹³ In her unusual citation practices, Bennion neither hides behind male authority nor defers to it. She takes full responsibility for her own ideas.

Bennion’s rhetoric displays nothing less than the agency she believes can confront both the problem of suffering and the problem of theology. She is unflinchingly intellectual, confident, direct, descriptive, and argumentative. She engages in the kind of doctrinal inquiry traditionally the domain of male authorities. But she does not allow her audience to defer to her authority, either. She acknowledges her limitations with phrases like “I think” and “as I read this passage.” She presents her own perspective but asks her audience to figure things out for themselves—to be “not listeners but thinkers.”¹⁴

“A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” is a powerful call to women in the Church and to all Latter-day Saints. Through her rhetorical choices, Bennion consistently treats herself and each listener as an agent. Instead of helplessly accepting the patchwork quilt, she eloquently demonstrates how to weave one’s own tighter, stronger theology. Her closing plea for women to “choose well” and “trust ourselves” is particularly significant given its delivery in an environment where what to choose and who to trust were disputed. But her speech is a promise that each individual is qualified and entitled to search for a theology that accounts for their reality. This search is the path to becoming like God.

A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering (1986)

Francine R. Bennion¹⁵¹⁶

[. . .]

We are accustomed to talking of fragments of theology—a topic here, an assumption or tradition there, often out of context with the whole. We are a people accustomed also to fragments of scripture out of context—a phrase here, a verse there, words that say something appropriate to the matter at hand, and ring with clarity and conviction. We have to do it; we haven’t time or ability to say everything at once. Sometimes, however, the clarity becomes blurred and the conviction open to question when a person puts some fragments with others. For example, what do you make of the following?

2 Nephi 2:25: “Men are, that they might have joy.”

Job 5:7: “Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

Deuteronomy 4:29–31: “But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him; . . . he will not forsake thee.”

Psalm 22:1–2: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? . . .”

Matthew 27:46: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Abraham 3:18: “Spirits . . . have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal.”

2 Nephi 2:14: “God . . . hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.”

Proverbs 3:13: “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.”

Ecclesiastes 1:18: “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

One function of theology is to provide a comprehensive framework that gives meaning to the fragments and the seeming contradictions or paradoxes which they suggest. Theology provides a framework that binds diversity and complexity into a more simple net with which we can make some sense even of things we don’t fully understand.

If we live long enough, we find diverse views and contrasting fragments not only in scripture but also in life. For example, Dorothy Bramhall went to Hawaii in February for the birth of a grandchild. She went also for a visit with a longtime friend, not LDS, who had lost two sons in a traffic accident and then struggled with her own cancer and amputations for many years. Dorothy wrote:

It’s been a week of varied emotions. My friend, Jean Kerr, died the morning after I arrived. It seems I’m destined to spend part of my beach time in Hawaii contemplating the death of a good friend. . . . Suffering without a sense of purpose seems bitter indeed. Her mother said her husband prayed all night for her to die. Does one who doesn’t believe pray to anyone or anything? Or is it merely another way of saying—he yearned for or hoped that she would die? Do you think such a prayer will be heard when all those given for her healing have not been?

Enough! My grandson was born at 5 a.m. Sat. . . . This is a miracle baby. When he was born the doctor showed them that the cord was knotted. The reason the baby survived is that his cord was unusually long, and the knot was never pulled tight. They are feeling very blessed. It’s always such a humbling feeling to look at a newborn—such utter perfection! I can hardly wait to hold him.¹⁷

The same week, the daughter of another of my friends gave birth to a premature Down’s syndrome child who has already had two of the six operations needed for survival. On March 2, a report released by the World Bank estimated that 730 million people in poor countries, not including China, lacked the income in 1980 to buy enough food to give them the energy for an active working life.

One function of any religion is to explain such a world as this, to provide a theology that makes sense of love and joy and miracles but also of suffering and struggle and lack of miracles. Good theology makes sense of what is possible but also of what is presently real and probable. In this twentieth century, it is not enough that a theology of suffering explain my experience; it must also explain the child lying in a gutter in India, the woman crawling across the Ethiopian desert to find a weed to eat, and the fighting and misery of many humans because of pride, greed, or fear in a powerful few. Satisfying theology must explain the child sexually abused or scarred for life, or the astronaut who is blown up and leaves a family motherless or fatherless. Good theology of suffering explains all human suffering, not just the suffering of those who feel they know God’s word and are his chosen people.

It is not enough that theology be either rational or faith promoting. It must be both. It is not enough that satisfying theology be mastered by a few expert scholars, teachers, and leaders. It must be comfortably carried by ordinary people. It is not enough that theology help me to understand God. It must also help me to understand myself and my world.

Theology does not prevent all hurt and anguish. No knowledge of theology can remove all pain, weakness, or nausea from all terminal cancer. Nor can it fill an empty stomach. What sound theology can do is to help those who believe it to make some sense of the suffering, of themselves, and of God, such sense that they can proceed with a measure of hope, courage, compassion, and understanding of themselves even in anguish.

There is no single theology of suffering in our Church, one framework uniform in all respects in the minds of all leaders and all other members. Though we may share the same scripture, the same revelation, prophets, and belief that God and Christ are real, we have various frameworks for putting them together and for seeing suffering, either our own or someone else’s. One person thinks God sends suffering to teach us or to test us. Another thinks God or Satan can affect only our response to the suffering, and some think it is Satan who is causing the suffering. Others think there should be no suffering at all if we are righteous and certainly no misunderstanding at all about why it is happening. These are only a few of the varieties of LDS belief about the origins of suffering, and however contradictory they be, each can be supported by fragments of scripture.¹⁸

We do not use identical principles or patterns to bind together fragments of scripture and life. In this twentieth century, with the history of the world before us, each of us has taken ideas and patterns from various sources to form our personal theologies of suffering. The complexity and power of those sources are evident in the story of Jephthah.

According to the book of Judges, chapter 11, Jephthah was asked to lead Israel against invading Ammonites.

[. . .]

“And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands,

Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering. . . .

And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.

And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.”¹⁹

As the story is told, Jephthah makes the sacrifice because he believes it to be right. At the core of his and his daughter’s theology are these principles: God controls human events and determines either victory or defeat in battle. God can be bargained with. God gives Israel victory because of Jephthah’s all-encompassing vow, his willingness to give God anything he has. God’s law requires that the vow be kept. According to our record in the book of Numbers, “If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.”²⁰

A human being’s function is to obey the law. If God had wanted the obedient daughter saved, he could have prevented her from dancing out at so inopportune a moment.

We do not all read the same things into Jephthah’s story, or into sacrifice.²¹ Even in so short a story, the context for suffering is complex and today provokes questions such as these: Who is really responsible for the suffering in this story? Jephthah? God? The religious leaders who taught the theology that contributed to the making and keeping of the vow? Persons who developed a social system in which a daughter is her father’s property? What of Jephthah’s wife, who isn’t even mentioned? What about Jephthah’s father and harlot mother, and the halfbrothers who threw Jephthah out of the house earlier in his life and perhaps contributed to his great desire for the power that victory would bring?²² What about Jacob, who set a precedent by bargaining with God?²³ Or Moses, who, without regard to circumstances, seemed to teach that keeping a vow was more important than “selfish” compassion?

This list does not, of course, exhaust the questions, which go beyond reasons for Jephthah’s vow; for example, is obedience always a virtue? Is the major difference between God and Satan just a matter of who’s in charge, demanding obedience?

[. . .]

Today, many who do think Jephthah rash nevertheless have “simply” made his version of God their own: a God who controls all human events; a God who can and must be bargained with; a God who considers unquestioning obedience to be the highest good—not just the means to goodness, but goodness itself; a God who causes suffering in the innocent and also authorizes theology that fosters it. Many who believe in such a God either ignore or are confused by inconsistency with other scriptures that seem to speak of God’s valuing agency above obedience,²⁴ love above tradition,²⁵ and the human heart above ritual sacrifice.²⁶

What do you think about Jephthah, his vow, and his God? Your answer will depend in part upon your own version of theology.

Does it really matter what we think? Can’t we just be kind and patient, without worrying about various points of theology?

It matters. For one thing, our assumptions affect how kind and patient we are likely to become. What Jephthah believed was central to what he did about suffering, and what we believe is central to what we do about it. For example, if we believe that inflicting suffering will further God’s work or glory, we may inflict it, as Irish and Lebanese and Iranians are currently doing, or as a father did by punishing his young son by putting his hands under scalding water, which nearly destroyed them, or as a husband is doing by telling his wife she can do nothing unless he tells her she can.

If we believe God wants suffering, we may not take responsible action to relieve or prevent it. Thirty-five years ago, one of my schoolteachers would not take medical help for a lump in her thigh because “God had given it to her.” In Relief Society one Sunday last year, a class member told us we shouldn’t concern ourselves with events in the newspaper because God is planning destruction before the Millennium anyway, and all we should concern ourselves with is our own righteousness and that of our children, and then we’ll be all right. A few years ago, one young woman’s confusion about God and suffering was central to her anguish and paralysis in the face of repeated violence: “I don’t know what it is God’s trying to teach me with my husband’s temper.”

Many who believe God is causing the suffering will not, or feel they cannot, ask him for help or comfort at the very time they need it most.

Another of the reasons our theology of suffering matters is that we may live comfortably with a framework which has inherent holes and contradictions as long as the suffering is someone else’s or as long as our own suffering isn’t very great. But holes and contradictions have a way of becoming very important when anguish is our own or when we feel the pain of persons we care about. Job’s friends said to him:

Behold, thou hast instructed many, and thou hast strengthened the weak hands.

Thy words have upholden him that was falling, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees.

But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest; it toucheth thee, and thou art troubled.²⁷

If, like Job, we find that the comforts we’ve offered others aren’t sufficient for our own experience, then the suffering itself, however great, is not the only problem. The problem is also that the universe and our ability to make sense of it have fallen apart, and we are without hope or trust in ourselves or in God.

[. . .]

We have not the mind of God. We see through a glass darkly now and will till we meet him and ourselves face to face and “know as we are known.”²⁸ There are times we must say, “I don’t know.” If we think we know everything, it is a sure sign we do not. But we are capable of learning much about this world and of considering what difference LDS doctrines can make to how we put together our experience, our diverse scriptures, our traditions, and well-supported but contradictory theological explanations. The better we understand what is at the core of LDS doctrine, the better we can distinguish what is not. We need not shroud ourselves helplessly in a crazy quilt stitched haphazardly from Old Testament theology, such as that of Jephthah, with a few patches of utopian thought and LDS doctrine embroidered on top. We can extend our understanding of LDS principles and use them as the core for a framework with which to make some sense of contradictory fragments.

Of course it may seem simpler to stay on well-worn traditional ground, but God—and this is one of the most important things we believe about him—has invited us to go further, to make suffering worth the trouble and to meet it as well as we can. We can be in the process of learning to do that whatever our current limitations or circumstances. Though our search for understanding be long or incomplete, it can lead us to courage, peace, and an increasingly truer sense of ourselves and God.

The traditional views are that we are alive because God put us here, or because Eve and Adam fell from innocence and trouble-free paradise through disobedience. These views are expressed in scripture. The Latter-day Saints believe, however, that these traditional views are fragmentary because they leave out several important things—for example, that we have existed without beginning and that we are here because we chose to come.²⁹ [. . .]

[. . .]

We wanted life, however high the cost. We suffer because we were willing to pay the cost of being and of being here with others in their ignorance and inexperience as well as our own. We suffer because we are willing to pay the costs of living with laws of nature, which operate quite consistently whether or not we understand them or can manage them. We suffer because, like Christ in the desert, we apparently did not say we would come only if God would change all our stones to bread in time of hunger. We were willing to know hunger. Like Christ in the desert, we did not ask God to let us try falling or being bruised only on condition that he catch us before we touch ground and save us from real hurt. We were willing to know hurt. Like Christ, we did not agree to come only if God would make everyone bow to us and respect us, or admire us and understand us. Like Christ, we came to be ourselves, addressing and creating reality. We are finding out who we are and who we can become regardless of immediate environment or circumstances.

What is the point of that? What is the point of knowing reality and being ourselves, of suffering as Dorothy’s friend Jean Kerr suffered and as many other people suffer daily? Why did this matter so much?

One reason we were willing to pay the high costs of continuing to address reality and become ourselves is that God told us we can become more like himself. We can become more abundantly alive, with ultimate fulness of truth, joy, and love—fulness impossible for souls unable to take real part in creating it, souls ignorant of good or evil, pleasure or pain, souls afraid of the unknown.

According to my understanding of scripture, we are not preparing now to begin in the next life to become more like God. We are not simply waiting to get started with the process. We are in it here and now. [. . .]

[. . .]

Beyond the specifics of suffering, we too are being “weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts” and are agents learning comprehensive matters, however brief, painful, or severely restricted earth experience might be. Even an infant born yesterday and dead of starvation or abuse within a week will experience physical reality, the quantum leaps, elements, motions, or processes which constitute physical existence. Even such an infant experiences something of how agents can affect each other and be affected by each other. [. . .]

[. . .]

I know the love of God. It is one of the very few things I do know with absolute certainty. I think suffering on this earth is an indication of God’s trust, God’s love. I think it is an indication that God does not want us to be simply obedient children playing forever under his hand, but wants us able to become more like himself. In order to do that we have to know reality. We have to be real ourselves and not dependent on externals. If we are to be like God, we cannot live forever in fear that we may meet something that will scare us or that will hurt us. We have to be able, as he is able, to meet what comes of others’ agency, and of living in a lawful universe that allows creation of a habitable planet only when it allows also the difficulties that come in natural operations of such a planet.

We exist now as adolescents between ignorance and full truth, with real interactions among ourselves and the universe more numerous and complex than we yet observe or comprehend. It is within this context that I trust God and his commandments. I do not believe I could do it within the traditional framework where his love and power are supposed to keep us from pain or struggle if we are good. Neither could I find it easy to trust him if I believed him to make a habit of manipulating natural law and other persons to give me just what I need to test or teach me—in other words, to make me the center of the world without regard to other persons’ agency or experience, and without regard to consistent, knowable law. In LDS theology, I believe, it is the large context for all humans that gives meaning to suffering. Within the context of LDS theology, I find hope for understanding and changing what I can, but also hope for transcending what I cannot. [. . .]

[. . .]

[. . .] Christ’s atonement makes it possible for us to go through the meeting of reality, the falling, the hungering, the screaming, the crawling on the floor, the being disfigured and scarred for life psychologically or physically, and still survive and transcend it. If that were not true, then our whole universe would have no meaning, and we had just as well be what Lucifer suggested, simply obedient robots.

Let us choose well the theology with which we frame our experience. Let us trust ourselves and God, asking continually for the help which is good. Let us love each other, mourn with each other, and sacrifice fear for courage. Let us seek reality and truth, forgiving ourselves and each other, learning to help ourselves and each other as we can. Let us become more like our God, who is good.

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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Eliza Wells is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on the normative dimensions of social roles, including gender, citizenship, and professions. She completed her PhD in philosophy at MIT and postdoctoral work at Harvard. She also works on feminism in the Mormon tradition and has an MA in religious studies from Stanford. Her analysis of gender in LDS general conference rhetoric appeared in Dialogue.

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. Jennifer Reeder and Kate Holbrook, eds., At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-Day Saint Women (Church Historian’s Press, 2017), 214.

2. See Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights (Signature Books, 2016).

3. “About Us,” BYU Women’s Conference, Brigham Young University, accessed July 30, 2023, https://womensconference.byu.edu/about.

4. For critical discussion, see Lavina Fielding Anderson, “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology,” Dialogue 26, no. 1 (1993): 7–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/45228619; Armand L. Mauss, “The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation and Identity: Trends and Developments Since Midcentury,” Dialogue 27, no. 1 (1994): 129–49, https://doi.org/10.2307/45228328.

5. Boyd K. Packer, “The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect,” Brigham Young University, August 22, 1981, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/eng/manual/ teaching-seminary-preservice-readings-religion-370-471-and-475/the-mantle-is-far -far-greater-than-the-intellect.

6. Bruce R. McConkie, “Our Relationship with the Lord,” BYU Speeches, Brigham Young University, March 2, 1982, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie/ relationship-lord/.

7. Philip L. Barlow, “Mind and Spirit in Mormon Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (Oxford University Press, 2015), 234, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199778362.013.17.

8. See, for example, Gordon B. Hinckley, “Faith: The Essence of True Religion,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1981, https://www.churchofjesus christ.org/study/eng/general-conference/1981/10/faith-the-essence-of-true-religion; Neal A. Maxwell, “The Great Plan of the Eternal God,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 1984, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general -conference/1984/04/the-great-plan-of-the-eternal-god.

9. J. L. Mackie, “IV.—Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64, no. 254 (1955): 200, https:// doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXIV.254.200.

10. Doctrine and Covenants 8:2.

11. A crazy quilt is a style of nongeometric quilting almost certainly familiar to Bennion’s audience. It was most popular in the late nineteenth century and experienced a revival in the 1980s. See Cindy Brick, “The Craze for Crazy Quilts,” New Pathways into Quilt History, accessed Feb 22, 2025, https://www.antiquequiltdating.com/The_Craze _for_Crazy_Quilts_began.html.

12. Sharon Black, Brad Wilcox, and Kyle Lyons, “Book of Mormon Citations in General Conference, 1965–2014,” Religious Educator 17, no. 3 (2016).

13. Eliza Wells, “Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference,” Dialogue 55, no. 4 (2021): 1–50.

14. This phrase appears in the audio recording at https://content.ldschurch.org/bc/ media/ATP/43-Francine-R-Bennion_1986_A-Latter-day-Saint-Theology-of-Suffering .mp3.

15. This excerpt follows Francine R. Bennion, “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering,” in At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, ed. Jennifer Reeder and Kate Holbrook (Church Historian’s Press, 2017). Slight variations can be found in the audio recording here: http://content.ldschurch.org/bc/media/ATP/43 -Francine-R-Bennion_1986_A-Latter-day-Saint-Theology-of-Suffering.mp3.

16. All the following footnotes are from the original.

17. From a personal letter to the author.

18. Individual interpretation and breadth of context affect the model to be drawn from any specific verse of scripture.

19. Judges 11:30–31, 34–35.

20. Numbers 30:2.

21. Compare the story of Jephthah with Greek accounts of Iphigenia and King Agamemnon. Though plots in the stories are similar, the tellers’ contexts, focuses, and theologies differ, as will those of their readers.

22. Judges 11:1–3.

23. Genesis 28:20.

24. For example, see Moses 4:1–3.

25. For example, see Matthew 5.

26. For example, see Isaiah 1:11–17.

27. Job 4:3–5.

28. See 1 Corinthians 13:9–12 in context.

29. See, for example, D&C 93:29–30; Abraham 3:18, 26–28; Moses 4:1–4; Revelation 12:7–9; D&C 29:36; and Wilford Woodruff’s record of Joseph Smith’s “King Follett Discourse,” available in The Words of Joseph Smith, comp. and ed. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook (Bookcraft, 1981), 343–48. If it were God who originally created our personal capabilities and quiddities, or if they originally came about by any kind of “chance,” then any differences among us, and results of them, must ultimately be attributed to God or to chance. We could not be responsible for what we are or what we do. If we are choosers now, we must always have been choosers, within the constraints that current knowledge, understanding, or abilities would allow.