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 Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart is a delightful, marvelous book. Inouye and Holbrook write in the “Introduction” that it “gathers together perspectives from scholars and professionals who demonstrate a multidimensional and characteristically Latter-day Saint approach to sacred endeavor” (4). This is certainly true.
It also is a book exclusively by women—all 23 essay contributors, both editors, the cover designer, the artist that created the artwork used for the cover, and even the indexer and typesetters, are all women. The book’s design reminds you of the diversity of its authors, subtly working to drive home the wide range of racial, cultural, and social backgrounds as well as the professional experience of these contributors by including a professional photo of each contributor on the opposite page from the essay’s beginning, with each essay prominently featuring its title and contributor’s name, as well as a fairly detailed paragraph biography, discussing what brings them to this collection. I was somewhat caught off guard initially by this, as it differs from the layout I’ve come to expect from essay collections. However, as I kept reading, I realized that these design choices deliberately foreground the women as individual contributors, pushing the reader to engage with each of them as full, embodied people, and to grapple with and learn from their specific, personal journeys of the mind and heart. This approach also highlights what is shared among the contributors, simultaneously drawing attention to commonalities and differences.
Inouye and Holbrook note that the “essays narrate journeys through challenging terrain” and that they reflect a faith that “is hard won…tested not only through life’s hard knocks but also through the rigor of their own critical faculties,” resulting in a faith that “is resilient, mature, and generous” (5). I appreciated the frankness and openness about the various challenges that the authors experienced (grappling with racism in the Church’s past and present, reckoning with gender equality in the Church, wrestling with belonging in an institution that doesn’t seem to value every piece of you, etc.). To the collection’s credit, not all of the authors describe the same problems and some even identify strengths in the Church where others note weaknesses. That is to say, the collection allows its authors to disagree with one another, to hold together these women and their stories, even when doing so creates dissonance.
The collection will be a remarkable resource for people wanting a broad introduction to a variety of ways that Latter-day Saints have brought their faith and scholarship, their minds and their hearts, together. I found many of the essays engaging and insightful and often wished to hear more from the authors. I was particularly moved by the essays from Kyra N. Krakos, Kimberly Applewhite Teitter, Farina King, Carrieanne Simoni Deloach, Michalyn Steele, Ariel Clark Silver, and Rosalynde Frandsen Welch’s “Afterword”. I wish I could dive into and explore the insights of all of these contributors, but I’ll highlight just three.
Farina King in her essay, “Walk in Beauty Every Step,” says, “As a person of mixed cultural background and ancestry, I have struggled to understand the complex intersections of my identity throughout my life. I have also been pressured to not identify as both Native American and Latter-day Saint. However, I have found that my faith has drawn me closer to my Diné identity” (118). Her essay, like many in the collection, explores the ways that she seeks belonging among a variety of communities, which may be pushing her out (implicitly and explicitly) because of other communities that she belongs to. My own experience as a queer Mormon with a variety of radical political convictions resonated with King’s ideas here.
Michalyn Steele, a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians, writes in her essay “Our Inescapable Connectedness,” “It is my conviction that we can be those ‘co-workers with God’ in our professional land personal lives as we strengthen the bonds of love and kinship among his children, proclaim peace, and advocate for the vulnerable among us” (188). Steele here draws on the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. I love the vision of faith as a collective, forward-looking action that she describes and that is echoed throughout many of the essays in the collection.
And finally, the essay that if I had to pick, would likely be my favorite of the collection, is Carrieanne Simoni Deloach’s “A Discomforted Disciple, but Disciple Nevertheless.” Deloach describes her adult conversion to the Church from Catholicism, saying:
A part of me hoped that entering the waters of baptism would magically wash away my deep longing to find parity between the representation of men and women in Heavenly Father’s restored gospel…However, I had not metamorphosed from a distressed caterpillar into a mollified butterfly. I was still me, the spiritually hungry, seeking feminist. (134)
Deloach continues throughout the essay to explore the ways that her identity as a “spiritually hungry, seeking feminist” was entangled in her faith and scholarship, resulting ultimately in her claiming her place as “a dedicated if at times discomforted, disciple” (139). I love this essay, love this language, and love this honest, frank discussion of Deloach’s hopes and longings, and questions, alongside the way that her faith persists through and with all of that. Powerful.
Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart is packed with snappy, insightful essays from women with a wide range of professional experiences from all over the globe. I hope the collection can inspire many more globally-minded, diverse, open conversations about the challenging terrain of our mortal journeys and the varied paths through that terrain to living with a mature faith. A great book for those looking for a chorus of diverse voices about what an honest, fulfilling, institutionally-committed life of the mind and heart might look like.