Review
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Title: Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart
Editors: Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye & Kate Holbrook
Publisher: Maxwell Institute
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 252
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1639931262
Price: $19.99
Reviewed by Doug Christensen for the Association for Mormon Letters
I heard Melissa Inouye and Kate Holbrook’s daughters and husband come together to discuss this passion project not long after Kate passed away. The memorable thing about that evening was the humility of the authors; in Kate’s case it was communicated by her family. This collaboration brings together a group of Latter-day Saint women who share a universal curiosity and the kind of humility required by the distinctive combination of high-level career success and dedicated religious faith. The book is framed by two Latter-day Saint scriptures about how “every needful thing” requires dedicated learning and grace (see D&C 88:78, 119). The twenty-two short essays come from women with a colossal amount of combined energy and wisdom.
The title of the book comes from a section of the Doctrine and Covenants that Joseph Smith describes as an “olive leaf plucked from the tree of paradise.” The authors then organize these women’s voices into five sections that are separated by features from D&C 88:78—80. So, the first section gets characterized by the first part of D&C 88:78, “My grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly”; the second section by the rest of that verse and part of verse 79: “In theory, in principle in doctrine, in the law of the gospel . . . of things both in heaven and in the earth and under the earth.” The remaining sections follow this trend. This organizing principle is both creative and useful because each author can be featured as part of the conversation in this illuminating section of scripture. The organizing principle is also nuanced and dynamic enough to allow for subtle correlations between authors to be sufficient.
It almost goes without saying that reviewing a collection is never fair to each author, and I will use only a few examples from these narratives with hopes that they can represent the whole. A few themes connect the authors besides gender and shared religious practice, namely, meaningful education and meaningful work.
The first author, Astrid Tuminez writes: “As a young girl, I linked learning, leadership, and professional work with faith. I did not separate secular pursuits from my religion” (13). Expanding on this notion, she further states: “My formal education and career have enriched my faith by helping me see that goodness and the influences of the Holy Spirit are varied, vast, and profound. My education positioned me for a global professional experience that in turn, shaped my faith” (14). While this reciprocating ethos of hard work and faith informs her essay, she also makes space for alternative views: “I have learned to welcome doubt without dismissing faith. I have learned that people outside my faith live just as full, happy, and topsy-turvy a life as I do” (18). Tuminez shows how humility helps her with her personal faith and with her faith in those with different or no faith. Each author in the book communicates this same tension, a desire to support the work of their church but also their work in the world.
The last author, Keakaokawai Varner Hemi, shares similar faith in others—she calls these others “Sister Travelers.” In the final paragraphs of her essay, Hemi describes a moving experience where, as an associate dean, she was able to extend an olive branch to a student with the weight of the world on her shoulders. Hearing and seeing this young student’s situated reasons for falling behind enabled Professor Hemi to apply her own humility and grace and to exercise faith in a student who wanted to succeed but had many simultaneous battles to fight. Hemi describes how both tried not to cry when they embraced at the student’s graduation. These bookend essays cast a long shadow over all the voices represented in between. They encapsulate an inspiring feminine pathos and ethos that makes the world better.
Julie Barrott Willis exemplifies this message when she writes: “Studying science has enabled my personal pursuit of knowledge. It has given me the tools to ask questions, look for both empirical and subjective evidence, and understand the iterative nature of unwrapping truth. That said, I must acknowledge that faith-based questions are not always answered satisfactorily” (98).
Farina King writes how:
as a scholar, I have hesitated to discuss my religious background in the workplace because many in Native American and Indigenous circles hold negative perceptions of the Church. I am working on a manuscript about Navajo Latter-day Saints, dine dóó Gáamalii, which will inevitably open a discussion about my positionality and subjectivity to a wider audience. (118)
Michalyn Steele writes movingly about how she, as a student of federal Indian law sees the complexity of how:
tribes have survived the legal, political, and cultural onslaughts of settler colonialism. Even as it continues to unfold . . . what [does] this story have to teach those of us who will listen about democracy and diversity, resilience and survival[?] I believe the preservation of the Native American people is a story replete with failures of law and policy, even when well-intentioned, that have led to untold suffering. But it is also a story of miraculous resilience and of a country working to redress its failures through more just laws and policies as it grows more tolerant of diversity and indigeneity (186).
She later turns to Dr. Martin Luther King in his:
Letter from Birmingham Jail” to remind us that “human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Instead, human progress happens due to what he called ‘the tireless efforts’ of those ‘willing to be co-workers with God’ in our professional and personal lives as we strengthen the bonds of love and kinship among his children, proclaim peace, and advocate for the vulnerable among us” (188).
This feels like a synecdoche for the collection of essays. There are many peculiar details I have not accounted for here, but the spirit in my few examples speaks to the caliber of the work.
The editors create something that really adds to the ongoing conversation of Latter-day Saint women’s work: work in the home, work in the marketplace of ideas, work in the Church, and in our communities across the world. Others have already contributed to this important conversation, now Inouye and Holbrook bring a new effort that deserves attention and application. Indeed, they bring “every needful thing” for conversations with this timeliness and gravity.