Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye was an eight-leaf clover. Rare in every field she graced, yet tenacious and humble, she brought a spirit of pragmatic peace-making into seminar rooms, hospital rooms, and (figurative) war rooms. A scholar of Chinese history, Melissa turned her clear eyes to the global dynamics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the community that nurtured and challenged her from birth and that elicited her best thinking. Melissa hardly slackened the energy of her writing and speaking over many years of treatment and illness with cancer, continuing to spearhead projects and address audiences until the end of her life.
Melissa’s passionate faith and incisive thinking made her one of the Maxwell Institute’s most valued associates. She lent her vision of a globally-inclusive latter-day Zion to numerous Institute projects over more than a decade. She sat for many years on the Maxwell Institute’s advisory and imprint boards, where she advocated for an inclusive approach that would showcase and speak to an ever-wider swath of global Latter-day Saints. She was a founding editor of the Mormon Studies Review, briefly housed at the Institute. She authored a lively memoir for the Institute’s Living Faith series, the memorably-titled Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer, and Motherhood (Not Necessarily in that Order). With Kate Holbrook, she co-edited the Institute’s Living Faith anthology Every Needful Thing: The Gospel of Jesus Christ in the Lives of Latter-day Saint Scholars, the product of the editors’ extraordinary efforts to identify, assemble, and nurture a globally-representative group of Latter-day Saint women scholars. And with Kate Holbrook, she proposed and implemented the Living Faith Author Initiative for Women, which supported women authors in producing gospel writing for a broad readership. The first volume to result from that initiative, Heather Chesnut’s book Counsel, Please Rise, will appear from the Maxwell Institute later this year.
In addition, Melissa was a featured participant at countless Institute events, lectures, and podcasts. On every occasion, she spoke with compassion, wisdom, and faith to call her listeners to a more expansive vision of Church belonging. With her historian’s training, Melissa was able to identify root drivers of the institutional and cultural dynamics that shape Latter-day Saint experience. She was often brilliant in clarifying sources of energy, growth, and contradiction. At the same time, Melissa was shaped from the cradle by the warm embrace of Latter-day Saint wards around the world. She knew both personally and academically what a rare and precious resource is the trust shared between covenant-knit Saints, and she fed that living fire with the best she had to give. Every ward she lived in was a microcosm of Zion because she made it so.
Especially notable among Melissa’s speeches is her 2019 Maxwell Institute Living Faith lecture, “Making Zion,” where she said:
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.
In the last years of her life, Melissa’s faith in Jesus Christ was refined in the crucible of prolonged physical suffering. She fought with extraordinary courage to continue living for her family and for her community and for her sheer joy in creation. Her suffering did not diminish her delight in children, in nature, in good company, and in Chinese street food. But it did give her a profound understanding of all those who labor under the many forms of pain and grief that mark this world. She found solace in her suffering from the truths of the restored gospel and its teachings that, through Christ, our sorrow may be redeemed and consecrated for the common good. Her life demonstrated that miraculous transformation.
The Maxwell Institute joins with many in mourning the loss of Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye’s irreplaceable voice in our community. We are grateful that she worked so hard to stay so long and give so much while she had breath. Her heart strained day and night with an urgent, ardent love for the Zion of the Restoration. Her life and work have immeasurably enriched the mission of the Institute and the intellectual life of Latter-day Saints. We cherish her memory and honor her legacy of faith and service.