Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye on the creation and content of Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart, co-edited by Inouye and Kate Holbrook.
On November 15, 2019, the Maxwell Institute’s Imprint Board met for dinner at a Provo restaurant. As we considered the Living Faith series as a whole we noticed that there were, at that point, just two books published by female authors (Crossings and One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly), and seven or more books published by male authors.
Spencer Fluhman encouraged Kate and I to confer and come up with some proposals to address this issue. I have just gone back into my saved emails and found the original proposal we sent to Spencer on November 21 (just six days later!). I had to laugh when I read the opening sentence of the memo (all in capital letters):
“WHY DON’T LATTER-DAY SAINT WOMEN SCHOLARS SUBMIT LIVING FAITH MANUSCRIPTS? Are they either non-living, or non-faithful?”
The very last bullet point in this memo proposed a Living Faith book that drew on the expertise of many different female Latter-day Saint scholars. We initially proposed fifteen (the book that resulted has twenty-two, plus an afterword by Maxwell Institute Associate Director Rosalynde Welch and a co-editors’ introduction). “Kate and Melissa would be happy to edit this volume,” we concluded. Then, switching from third to first person: “We have a clear sense of direction for how to proceed.”
The idea in our head was to diverge from the existing Living Faith model, in which one scholar in one discipline wrote an entire book about their area of expertise and its intersection with the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we just asked for one essay from a scholar who also happened to be a woman, we would be able to include more women’s voices in the series. Moreover, the diversity of academic perspectives and life experiences would show that there were many ways in which to be a disciple-scholar. It would also allow us to bring together a broad collection of authors whose ethnic and national backgrounds represented the Church’s global membership more accurately than previous publications in this vein.
Every Needful Thing is an exploration of how the life of the mind and the life of the heart and spirit interact with each other and complement each other.
The book provides mentors and role models who have pursued careers in in biology, law, medicine, geology, history, political science, mathematics, psychology, public health, literature, business, education, botany, and choral music.
It includes luminaries such as Esohe Ikponmwen, retired Chief Justice of Edo State in Nigeria; Astrid S. Tuminez, UVU’s president; Elizabeth Hammond, a medical researcher; and Valerie Hudson, a celebrated political scientist.
It also includes rising stars such as Farina King, a scholar and public intellectual in the fields of history and indigenous studies; Keakaokawai Varner Hemi, a scholar of law and Pacific studies at the University of Waikato; and CarrieAnne Simonini DeLoach, a scholar of Latter-day Saint attitudes toward war and violence.
There are incredible meditations on science and faith from Emily Bates, Julie Willis, and Kyra Neipp Krakos. Krakos, a biologist who studies plant-pollinator interactions, begins her essay with an unforgettable opening image of “petting bees.” Ana Maria Gutierrez Valdivia tells her incredible personal story of growing up in extreme poverty and becoming a public health professor and eventually academic vice-rector of one of Peru’s major universities. Kimberly Teitter talks about how her faith and the work of clinical psychology overlap. Tanya Wendt Samu lays out the “pillars” of her faith as a Samoan-Maori Latter-day Saint academic: tautua (service & responsibility), alofa (love and commitment), fa’aaloalo (respect).
As an example of the intersection of academic and spiritual inquiry in the book, here is a wonderful story told by Noemi Lubomirsky, a mathematician. She recounts how, after many times of attempting to solve a difficult mathematical problem and failing, in the quiet peace after serving for several hours in the Buenos Aires Argentina Temple, “I decided to return to a very difficult problem related to my thesis. I took a sheet of paper, and once more, as I had done many times in the previous months, I wrote out my problem. As I worked, I began to see relations between many principles I had studied before, and I was finally able to prove one of the main theorums of my thesis. It was not that I found the proof in any principle that I learned in the temple, but I think it was not a coincidence. I needed a clear mind, full of light and truth, to find more truth.” (p. 109)
I don’t have space, or else I would give a summary of every single contributor and their story! You’ll have to read the book!
Every contributor is a world-class scholar or practitioner. They all happen to be practicing Latter-day Saint women, as well. These essays combine candor, faith, hope, and charity, wrestling with tensions and demonstrating how they kept finding the path forward. In so many instances it is clear how religious faith was not an encumbrance to brilliant scholarship or professional achievement, but the catalyst for it.
Also there is a stunning cover image custom-painted for the book by Melissa Tshikamba. The image is a sort of “still life” that captures elements of the kitchen tables or work desks of the twenty-five total contributors. Note the bees, one of Tshikamba’s favorite images, and also a reference to Krakos’s essay.
A note at the very end of the book, just after Kate’s editor’s note, notes that Kate passed away in August 2022, just as the book was going to press. I miss Kate so much, as do we all. I trusted her and looked up to her. In any delicate and strategic situation, she was always the “designated driver.” In her absence I feel quite inadequate in my efforts to disseminate the message of Every Needful Thing. I ask that friends or admirers of Kate help further her work by spreading the word about this book, and also her own solo-authored Living Faith book which is due to release this summer.
When I read Every Needful Thing to my daughter at night, my heart is full of joy because the things that I am reading, from the biographies of the contributors to their descriptions of the thrill of learning to their profound and hard-won testimonies, exactly describe the vision of Zion I hope she will make her own: clear-eyed, confident, able to handle nuance and complexity, and full of joy and gratitude for all of life’s needful things.
Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is a Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland and Historian at the Church History Department. She earned her degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. She is the author of China and the True Jesus: Charisma and organization in a Chinese Christian church (Oxford, 2019), and the memoir, Crossings: a bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar’s ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood (not necessarily in that order) (Deseret Book and BYU Maxwell Institute, 2019).
For more on Every Needful Thing, please see this Faith Matters interview with Melissa and Kate, recorded not long before Kate’s passing.