Maxwell Institute Podcast #165: How Can "Both Things Be True"? Featuring Miranda Wilcox
This episode of the podcast is very close to my heart. I’m speaking with Dr. Miranda Wilcox, my friend and colleague, about a new book just out from the Maxwell Institute, written by the late Kate Holbrook and titled Both Things Are True. Miranda and I had the privilege of shepherding the book to completion after Kate died of cancer in 2022. Miranda, who is a professor of English at BYU, co-edits the Maxwell Institute’s book series we call “Living Faith,” a series now up to seventeen titles featuring scholars who write in a personal, conversational way from their professional expertise to strengthen faith. In that capacity, Dr. Wilcox served as lead editor for Both Things Are True, the latest book in the series.
Kate Holbrook, who at the time of her death was the managing historian of women’s history at the Church History Department and a longtime friend and advisor to the Institute, spent her professional life discovering and amplifying the voices of other women, and mentoring other people in how to do the same. So Miranda and I wanted to find a very special lens to approach this very special book.
We settled on a luminous essay by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, a writer whom Kate revered and whose rigorous spirituality inspired Kate’s own scholarly methods. We felt that Weil’s essay resonates in profound ways with Kate’s aims in Both Things Are True, and we hope that the essay will be a kind of gift to you from Kate. We also hope, of course, that this interview will inspire you to buy the book and fully absorb the wisdom and compassion of Kate Holbrook. She wanted nothing more than to share what she had found.
Rosalynde Welch: Hello, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast, where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship. I'm Rosalynde Welch, Associate Director at the institute. This season, we're exploring The Questions We Should Be Asking. Thanks for joining us.
This episode of the podcast is very close to my heart. I'm speaking with Dr. Miranda Wilcox, my friend and colleague about a new book just out from the Maxwell Institute, written by the late Kate Holbrook entitled Both Things Are True. Miranda and I had the privilege of shepherding the book to completion after Kate died of cancer in 2022. Miranda, who is a professor of English at BYU, co-edits the Maxwell Institute's book series we call Living Faith, a series now up to 17 titles featuring scholars who write in a personal conversational way from their professional expertise to strengthen faith. In that capacity, Dr. Wilcox served as lead editor for Both Things Are True, The latest book in the series, Kate Holbrook, who at the time of her death was the Managing Historian of Women's History at the Church History Department, and a longtime friend and advisor to the institute spent her professional life discovering it amplifying the voices of other women and mentoring other people and how to do the same. So Miranda and I wanted to find a very special lens to approach this very special book. We settled on a luminous essay by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, a writer whom Kate revered, and his rigorous spirituality inspired Kate's own scholarly methods. We felt that Weil’s essay resonates in profound ways with Kate's aims in Both Things Are True. And we hope that the essay will be a kind of gift to you from Kate. We also hope, of course, that this interview will inspire you to buy the book and fully absorb the wisdom and compassion of Kate Holbrook. She wanted nothing more than to share what she had found. Good morning, Miranda Wilcox, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.
Miranda Wilcox: Thanks, Rosalynde, for inviting me to talk about Kate Holbrook’s new book, Both Things Are True.
Welch: This is a book that the Maxwell Institute has just published together with Deseret Book. It's a book Miranda, that you and I both worked on. Miranda, you in the capacity of editor. This wasn't just any editing job. It was a very special and challenging one because Kate passed away in 2022. So we worked together on this book, largely in her absence. But with her presence always in our mind and in our hearts. As a way to talk about Kate's ideas, we decided to approach it through the lens of a writer that Kate loved. And this is a woman named Simone Weil. I'll share something with our audience that I recently learned. Simone Weil's last name is spelled W E I L. So if you're going to look her up, that's how you'll spell it. But it's not pronounced while it's pronounced Weil. That was new to me. So Simone Weil was a French philosopher and an educator in the first half of the 20th century. Weil was a woman of deep Christian faith that she came to over the course of her life. And she seems to have drawn great personal strength from a contemplative relationship through prayer that she developed with God. Weil wrote a book called Waiting for God, that we're going to use sort of as our template today talking about Kate's ideas. Kate knew and loved this book. And we know that because she talks about it in Both Things Are True. So Miranda, share with us the quote that Kate had posted above her desk.
Wilcox: So she says, This is Kate, “I have a quotation near my desk to remind me that good thinking and good work take time and careful study.” The words are from Simone Weil, a French philosopher, she thought a great deal about right and wrong and she made great personal sacrifices to live in ways she determined were morally right. They taught, quote, “all wrong translations, all absurdities, in geometry, problems, all clumsiness of style and all faulty connections of ideas. All such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked is not open to truth,” unquote. And this quotation comes from an essay that she probably wrote in 1942. And it's titled, just a little bit more context, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God, and she's arguing that learning how to study basic subjects, school subjects, is a way to learn how to be attentive. And this attentive quality is something that we need to bring to bear in prayer. And so the more attention we can learn how to give intellectually, the more spiritual attention we can give to God.
Welch: So why do you think Kate loved this quote so much to the point that she would post it above her desk and have it as a kind of motto for everything that she did?
Wilcox: Based on what I know of the genesis of this book, she had been working on a series of essays where she was trying to explore pulling competing tensions hand in hand. So initially, the book was titled Two Things Are True. And then through the production process, we ended up changing the title to Both Things Are True. But each essay in the book explores a tension in which there are competing or complementary truths that need to be held simultaneously. And Kate tries to help us understand how difficult this is, but the rewards that come from doing that. So in the first chapter, she explores the concept of the church being true, but also not tidy, right? Church history is not tidy, it's very messy, it's complicated, but she helps us explore resources intellectually and spiritually and interpersonally for living in that tension of the church being true, but not tidy. In the second essay, she explores revelation as a process. She says, revelation comes from God, but usually comes very slowly. And it's often very difficult for humans to interpret. And in the next chapter, she talks about housekeeping as being a crucible of discipleship. Historically, housework has been a drudgery for women in particular, but Kate argues when done in balance, it can also be a gift. And it's an opportunity to practice spiritual skills such as forgiveness and patience. In the next chapter, she talks about the importance of forgiving, but not forgetting, both in terms of historic, looking back on the past and memorializing the past, but also in our interpersonal relationships. And then in the final chapter, she talks about how it's good to want our lives to make a difference, to have to leave a legacy that matters. But at the same time, we need to not get caught up worrying about our reputation in a way that's vain, or is like motivated more about self-aggrandizement than actually nurturing the other people and helping build our communities in nurturing ways. So that's kind of in a nutshell, are the essays that she'd been working on since at least 2018. And received these essays in varying states of completion just nine days before she died. And you, Roslynde took on the role of vicarious writer and finished those essays with the help of Jana Reese and Jenny Pulsipher, and Morgan Davis, and I co-edit the Living Face series and this book was published in the series. And so I was involved as a series editor in the process. Her own life had been, her own family stories had been complicated, so I think that also was part of the impetus of her wanting to think through the challenges of tensions that are simultaneously true. She talks briefly about her father who left her and her mother when she was an infant, and he made a lot of bad choices in his life. But at the same time, Kate recognizes he made a lot of good choices. And before he died, he did come back to the church and she says “the flame of my own courage is strengthened when I think of the courage it took for him to pursue those reinstatements of his temple and Priesthood privileges and place those phone calls to a daughter he had abandoned when she was six weeks old.” She said, “coming to terms with his legacy and efforts at love have been a human and godly, revelatory experience for me, even with all the mistakes my dad made, I honor him for the hard things he did right. His is not a tidy story, but in addition to forewarning me it also inspires me.” and she goes on and she talks about how thinking about true but not tidy stories, requires patience and hope that she says it requires patience and hope to adopt a view of revelation as a counterbalance process that links our imperfect human efforts with God's loving gift. And she says for her, she sees this in James Christensen's painting the responsible woman. She said a friend gave her cut-out from a magazine this picture and she took it on her mission with her and she had it in every apartment and then later, another friend found a bigger version of the painting and framed it for her and it has hung in her home. But this is a picture of a woman who's, she's just weighed down by all these objects. All these objects are stuck to her body like a baby and musical instruments and a broom and a dog. But yet somehow this woman is flying through the desk holding a candle. And Kate says, “I believe the candle symbolizes personal revelation and is the reason she can fly. It's true that the candle is another thing that she must carry in her overloaded body fills her hand and weighs her down and it looks fragile. But at the same time,” she says, “yet, the candle also seems to be lifting and leading her into the darker night above the two things that are true of the candle are true of revelation. Discerning revelation can be slow, heavy work, and revelation lights and lifts to suit the darkness.” And I think that's what this book is, is Kate's gift to her three daughters, to her friends, to her colleagues and to the wider faith community of the revelation that she received over the course of her life.
Welch: Miranda, I so appreciate how you've set out for us these three objects that we can hold up to understand who Kate was, and what she wanted to accomplish in this book. First and most primally, her personal story, her personal story of loss and of messiness in her personal life as her relationship with her father was not what it could have been in what it should have been. But she learned to love him and she learned to accept him, and she was able to do this by suspending judgment on him and giving him time to grow and come back. And this picture of the responsible woman, it seems like it should be impossible for her to fly, right, she's so weighted down and loaded down. And yet she does, she does fly. Once again, what seems impossible, becomes possible and becomes reconcilable, when we give it the time to breathe. And then finally, where we started with this beautiful quote by Simone Weil, that teaches us precisely how to do that, how to let two things that are true, have room to breathe in our minds in our hearts in our lives. And then to let God do the beautiful work of reconciling them, or letting them be together in their difference. Sometimes there's no ultimate reconciliation, and instead, there's a beautiful kind of coexistence that comes. I really love what Weil says about attention at another place in that essay, close to the quote that Kate loves so much. This is what Weil says, “attention consists of suspending our thoughts, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired in which we are forced to make use of above all our thoughts should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth, the object which is to penetrate it.” Now you and I were talking a few minutes ago. There are some ways in which Kate's view differs from this view of Weil, right. Weil here sets out a very passive model of waiting for truth to come to us. And Kate was much more active in her search, she was not afraid to go out and to seek and to ask questions and to find the right sources. But what they share in common is a deep appreciation for the work of time and the work of patience, and a trust, a trust in a good God who wants to give his children bread and not stones. trust that God will bring the light that's needed when it's necessary. So for Weil and for Kate, academic work and kind of truth about the world around us discovering truth about the world around us has a very special kind of exemplary role in training the attention. And so both of them awarded the kind of pride of place in our search for truth in our search for God. So talk to us a little bit about this connection between spiritual truth and scholarly truth as she develops it in Both Things Are True.
Wilcox: So in her first chapter, titled “I Belong to the True and Living Church”, Kate shares her process as a historian, and she's speaking to other members of the church who might be struggling with difficult episodes in church history or trying to come to terms with how to make sense of the messiness of church history. She talks about this need for responsible seeking that she practices as a historian and she gives this example that I found really moving. She says, “When you find that you're internally compelled to seek the truth of a difficult question, then you need to embark on that search.” She's like, “Don't borrow somebody else's quest, right? If a question doesn't bug you, like, you don't need to jump on that bandwagon.” She's inevitably right, at some point in your life, something is going to just spark this need for a search and she says, “And when it does, then you need to be responsible in that search.” And so she gives an example from her own life. She said “When I first started thinking about what it means that the church is true and what it means to reconcile the church's truth with all truth. I remembered the quotation, I want her to attribute it to Brigham Young, I’d heard it as a child and it has profoundly shaped the choices that I've made in my life and my attitude to this beautiful world and all the beautiful things that I embrace in it. But I'd never been able to find the exact quotation I once heard. This is how I remember the gist of the passage, quote, ‘There's truth everywhere, and you should be open to it and look for it.’” Unquote. She said, “I tried to track down the actual quotation and see whether I remembered it correctly.” So here's Kate the historian right trying to track down this quotation that she heard as a child and now working at the church history department. She knows the experts on Brigham Young and so she goes to law LaJean Caruth, who's an expert in Pitman shorthand, and this is the special script that was used in 19th century Utah. And people recorded the sermons that they heard by church leaders. And so LaJean Caruth went looking for this sermon by Brigham Young and this is what she found or transcribed. Brigham Young said, quote, “The Church embraces every science upon the earth, every knowledge that is imparted to men is from God, and is within our religion, there is no truth that has ever been revealed that we do not believe. And at the same time, when people are disposed to point out errors, we are willing to acknowledge that we have errors.” So Kate goes on. And she says this quotation, like this more accurate, authentic quotation, right, is really remarkable. She talks about how Brigham Young expresses real spiritual confidence, boldly stating that there is a true church and this is it. But at the same time, he's also humble. She says, “I love this turn of senate.” She says “there's also the humility that blooms from spiritual confidence,” she says “it's as if Brigham Young is saying there's a truest church, and even so we bumbling humans aren't going to get everything right. Also, our members and our leaders are not going to be the sole source of truth, God will reveal truth elsewhere, and we are still beholden to that truth, even though it doesn't come from us.” And so I really liked how this example shows her process. She talks about how you know, she tracks down the quotation, she took care to question her memory and motives to avoid self-deception and selfishness and careless air. Second, she describes how she seeks out the most reliable sources of information, aware that not all sources are equally reliable, like the Journal of Discourses is not entirely reliable. Third, is she says she compared her findings with other reliable sources to confirm or discount the accuracy. And it was only at that point, right, that she felt confident she did arrive at the truth and then she takes the time to interpret that truth, right, which I just really liked her interpretation of Brigham Young, you know, having spiritual confidence, but also having spiritual humility at the same time.
Welch: Well, it strikes me that you're getting at maybe what are two of the truest things about Kate herself, she loved the restoration. I think she loved the boldness and the expansiveness of the restoration’s claims that it is the church is true, and that we have access to truth and that God gives us that access. And that, in fact, everything that is true, has a place in our religion. In that same chapter, she quotes President Nelson in 2015, as Nelson was here on BYU campus, and he was dedicating a new science building. And he said this, “there is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion, or both. All truth is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether truth comes from a scientific laboratory, or by revelation from the Lord. It is compatible.” And Kate had remarkable faith and trust in those promises. That's one thing that was true about her. Another thing that was true about her is that she understood that it's an incremental, and as we've been repeating this word a lot, it can be a messy process to get there, she knows that we can get there. But she's open-eyed about what it looks like to get there. And as you say, I love how she pulls back the curtain on the scholar's process and shows how there's a lot of mistakes along the way. You don't come out the other end with something that is solid and reliable and true without having to walk the walk and get there through investigation and self-correction. And so she has trust in both of those realities. And it's remarkable here in the book, how we get to see her in real time getting there. So taking Weil as our inspiration as Kate did, there will be a process of waiting that's involved. It's an active waiting, as Kate showed us where we're actively trying to refine our ideas and getting there and seeking bread from God. It can take a long time for the light to dawn. And if we get impatient, we can close the question too soon, right? That's the great risk. That's the quote that Kate always had above her desk. “Don't stop seeking too soon.” So she illustrates this idea with a speech that Kate really loved. And she referred to it often in her life by a scholar named Julie Willis.
Wilcox: Yeah. So Julie Willis, the geologist at BYU Idaho, and in her sermon, which Kate and Jenny reader actually include in at the pulpit, Kate describes Julie Willis's talk gaining light through questioning. She says, “Willis describes her experience with a long search for spiritual truth. Her quest began with an impatient phase during which she demanded answers directly from God. But with time and spiritual maturity, she found that the quality of her questioning changed and she began to find light from surprising sources.” She writes, quote, “I no longer demanded an answer, and I didn't limit the timeframe or how or where I would receive insights. The answer didn't come all at once. Insights came at odd times and in odd places. While reading an article in a non LDS magazine left on an airplane evaluating a statistical analysis in a newspaper listening to a discussion in more council or doing the dishes I found it surprising that many of my insights did not come while listening to General Conference or drain scripture study. But when I received an insight, I could see how it fit directly with those sources.” Unquote. And then Kate goes on over a period of years Willis's questions question was answered line upon line, she describes the experience like a dimmer switch, gradually increasing in brightness, even when she had answered the question to her satisfaction. When she had enough light to see around the room comfortably. She continued to find new ideas that added insight. What if she had never asked the question and launched her search for truth? And so Kate goes on. And she she says that she loves the church because it empowers its members to search and seek for truth.
Welch: I mean, the insight itself is so powerful, but I love how Kate gets there, it was always a priority in her life to elevate the importance of Latter-day Saints, women's history, she knew it inside out like the back of her hand. And she was the church's foremost expert on Latter-day Saint women's history. And it was also important to her to elevate individual Latter-day Saint women's voices. That was a true passion for her. So we see that you mentioned this book At the Pulpit, 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women,and so she combed the archives to discover gems like this talk by Julie Willis, that might otherwise have gone unremarked or gone forgotten. But she took the time to understand them to draw out their importance, and to amplify and elevate those voices.
Wilcox: Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Welch: So this kind of leads to the next question, my favorite moment in this short essay by Simone Weil, that was so important to Kate Holbrook, my favorite moment comes where she makes this really fascinating transition, she's been showing us that this kind of finely tuned attention is what allows us to open up a genuine channel of communication to God, right, if we get down on our knees, and we're distracted, there's really just no way that we're going to have that connection with God. So through certain kinds of scholarly work or other kinds of mental work, we can train our attention, to be able to pray effectively to God. But then she goes on to show that in the same way, this finely tuned and trained faculty of attention is what allows us to connect with our neighbor as well. So finely tuned attention is the way that we can fulfill both of the two great commandments to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That's so meaningful to me, because just as I've been saying, throughout her career, it was so important to Kate to pay attention to and to amplify the voices of communities that might otherwise be marginalized, you know, women in particular, but not only women, she was also deeply concerned with issues of race, of community, of respect. How do we see this play out in Both Things Are True
Wilcox: If I could just quote a bit of Simone Weil, she says, quote, “the capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’ it is a recognition that the sufferer exists,” unquote. Like you said, I think Kate really strives to understand what the women of the past, what they went through. And she also built bridges with lots of communities during her lifetime, whether it be saints living in other parts of the world, whether marginal communities marginalized portions of the community here in the Wasatch Front, but she very much cares about what people are going through and, and tries to help through her scholarship and through the gathering mentoring that she did through her life, to build communities and build bridges. So in addition to seeking out good sources for interpreting church history, she says, “really what being a true church means to her is that the true church brings us into true relation.” She said, “what really at the heart for her the struggle is really about is how to do right by my relationships with other people.” She says “my confusion is only secondarily about the church's history or truth claims. For me the most urgent and relevant questions about the truth of the church have to do with our relationships to one another and to God. Do you find God in the church? Does earnest church participation bind you to others? Does the ritual and service you engage in a church and larger soul? To prioritize the relational dimensions of truth is not to discount the importance of our doctrine or history nor sweep any of it under the rug, it is simply to recognize that the point of church doctrine in history has always been to create enduring relationships build in Christ. I believe that focusing on the truth of our relationships within the shelter of church is the best way to demonstrate genuine fidelity to the truth of our doctrine and history.” And she goes on, and she talks more about this idea of fidelity. She says, “I mean, this kind of faithfulness, as spouses offer each other a loving commitment to honor vows and be true to one another in all things. She says “in fidelity to the church, we commit to being in true and faithful relationship to God and to one another.” And there are a couple points in the book where she demonstrates her fidelity to the community. She does this by magnifying the voices of others, she talks about the experience of Darius Gray, who joined the church in 1964, black man, and she says that Darius is someone who taught her how to navigate the balance between avoiding anachronistic judgments and acknowledging bad behaviors in the past to keep us from perpetuating them. But at the same time, not forgetting what happened, but finding the healing of forgiving in the present. So she includes a quotation from Darius talking about finding out the night before he's baptized, that once he's baptized, he's not going to be able to receive the priesthood or go to the temple because he's a black man, and how deeply painful that was. But at the same time, he heard the voice of God, and that told him to get baptized. And so he did. And it Kate talks about how courageous Darius was, and what a great, wonderful teacher that he's been. So she's quoting Darius, he said it in this way, “the first step toward healing is the realization that the problem exists, even among some of us in the church, as President Hinckley pointed out, ‘we cannot fix that which we overlook or deny’. So racism in particular, our attitudes toward others of a different race or of a different culture should not be considered a minor matter, viewing them as such, only affirm the willingness to stay unchanged.” Kate was bold, to address this very, very sensitive topic. And to do so is really, really hard as a white woman is really, really hard. But I'm grateful to Kate that she shares Darius this story in a way that I think helps me understand more about the pain that too many of our members of our community experienced when they were not. She said, “I've come to believe that a crucial aspect of our work as historians is to represent people in ways that are fair. Meaning we consider the whole person and not just those aspects that help us prove a favorite point, there's a holiness and responsibility in the work of telling a person's story and preserving their legacy.”
Welch: Kate never used another person's life or another person's experience, to make the point that she wanted to make, she was willing to be derailed, to dive into their experience to make sure that she's getting it right from their point of view. And I think this speaks in part to that mental faculties that Weil is always reminding us of slowing down the rush to conclusion, and being willing to make the detour if necessary to get it right. There's holiness and responsibility in that, just as she said, and as you quoted, Kate always wanted to make sure, it seems to me, that we understood the importance of a person's life from the inside, and that we understood the dignity and the meaning that infused their experience from the first person point of view, even if from the outside, that person might appear insignificant. So I think she was drawn to communities and persons in history who might from the outside look as though they're not central to the really important engines of history. But she was drawn to them, and she wanted to see if she could figure it out. What made them tick, what motivated them, what was important to them, and make them central in their own lives. And she accomplished that. I want to underscore the point that Dr. Wilcox and I arrived at just now in the conversation. Kate Holbrook had the spiritual courage to face up to difficult passages of church history, painful experiences of individuals facing racism, sexism and other injustices because of her faith that the church is true. Sometimes we tell a different story that exploring church history is dangerous to our testimonies, or that outside critics emphasize the hard parts of church experience. As far as I can tell, though, Kate went there, because of her trust in God, her confidence in church leaders and her bedrock faith that the church is true, and can lead us into true, Christ-like relationship with other people. Let's get back to my conversation with Miranda. In the second half, we talk about our favorite part of the book, the chapter on Kate's theology of housework, yes, housework. And Miranda shares, a personal battle with a sight disorder, double vision that has brought new and hopeful meaning to Kate's conviction that two things are true. Weil, in this essay is very much focused on school work on academic work on scholarship. But she makes a very important caveat, which is that not everybody has the privilege to devote their life to academic setting, and not everybody wants to not everybody has the inclination or the gifts, and that's okay, and Weil says it's very possible to get close to God in other ways, including through physical labor. This leads me to a chapter that I know, is a special favorite of you and me both right in the middle of the book. It's a chapter about housework. And we've alluded to it before. And it might surprise readers to find this meditation on housework, right in the middle of this book of essays about kind of theology and these other what seem again, like more important questions. But for Kate, actually, the question of housework was central, central to her experience and central to her understanding of the gospel. So, share with us how Kate sees housework as a crucible of discipleship.
Wilcox: Okay, I'm not going to do this justice, because housework is a very central theme for Kate. And so in her chapter, she very boldly at the very beginning of the chapter says that she is going to lay out a theology of housework she says, “I hereby propose a theology of housework after she's identified ways in which Jesus Himself did housework.” And she explains that most of what we know about Jesus are his early 30s, when he probably doesn't have a home of his own, but yet, he takes on the responsibility for thinking about meals. As he's traveling with his disciples. He cooks, he performs miracles to make sure that people have things to eat. He serves people at the wedding, turning water to wine at Cana, he washes people’s feet, which would have been considered an act of housework. And she says, “Jesus's acts of service show that no housework no lack of care is beneath God. He showed us that the planning and the work of housework are well worth our energy because he performed them even when he didn't have a house because housework is an essential means of serving others. I believe he will help us do it.” So with that, she says, I hereby propose a theology of housework. She says theology is the study of religious faith and practice and housework can be a religious practice, something that can bring us closer to God and other people, and yet at the same time, right, she hasn't ignored that. Housework is really hard. It's physical labor, it can be all consuming. Right? She says, “both things are true about the crucible of housework, it can make us feel inadequate, and it can be an opportunity to understand God more fully, increase our sense of gratitude, and receive answers to pleas for help.” And she talks about some demons that she confronted in her own life through housework. She talks about also confronting guilt. She said “guilt about not doing enough housework or not doing it perfectly, or choosing to have hire someone to help us with it, or even do it for us.” And so she she spent some time talking about the moral questions of navigating those choices. She had a full time job or husband had a full time job, they had three children. There were periods of her life where she did most of the housework. She talks about how that led to resentment when her husband was working on the computer, and she was doing laundry. And that came to a head after she was diagnosed with cancer and having surgeries and couldn't physically take care of the house on her own. And Sam himself talks about as he called it, but womaning up, like learning to take a more active role in the home, cooking, cleaning, there being more equity in sharing those responsibilities. Kate, you know, as a historian knows, historically, there are a lot of gendered expectations around housework. And that's definitely his source of frustration. She has a whole chapter about forgiveness, but chapter on housework, she talks a lot about forgiveness and forgiveness, being a part of one of the spiritual practices of housework. And I think this is helpful in terms of particularly for women, about forgiving themselves and and forgiving people around keeping their environments clean and tidy. Probably the garden was the area where she felt the greatest gift of housework. And maybe I won't read this, and I'll encourage you to buy the book or the ebook, or listen to it. But the end of that chapter, she talks about the garden as being a place as a gift. And it's just a beautiful passage about gardening and how much she just loved being in her garden. And that I think, really speaks to Kate's personal character.
Welch: I agree. That passage is worth the price of admission, in and of itself, you get to see the humorous side of Kate come out. It's very funny. The end of this housework chapter where she's talking about her garden. It's very poignant. It's very personal. It's a kind of writing that we didn't often see from Kate, the historian. It's Kate in a personal mode that we're privileged to see here. So for Kate housework is a crucible of discipleship because it's a difficult and it's a conflict prone venue for relationship. It is precisely that conflict, the potential for conflict that makes the stakes high, the potential for injustice that makes the stakes high. But it also gives us the best practice in forgiveness and in resolving conflict and uncompromised. And this is a theme that we see throughout the book. And we've alluded to it before that, in the end, it comes down to relationships, and finding ways to be in right and Christ-like relation to each other. The same is true for her scholarly work writ large, she takes the same approach to her scholarly work as she did to our housework, which is that it's not so much about the work itself. And if we get mired in perfectionism, and our ego gets involved in the work itself, then we're missing the point and we're gonna get stuck. Instead, it's about the relationships that we form while we're doing this work. She has a wonderful chapter that we've concluded the book with, it's called the weight of legacy. It started as Kate's Maxwell Institute lecture in 2020. So listeners can actually go to YouTube, and you can see Kate deliver this speech, and then you can see how she revised it, and then we revise it on top of that, for this place in this book. She had tremendous courage to think about the meaning of her life, knowing that her life would be shortened. When I think about the meaning of my life I, I have the luxury of imagining decades in front of me to realize that and to discern that, but Kate didn't have that luxury. And when she gave this talk and wrote this chapter, she knew that her life would be short and it deeply moves me that she had the courage and the generosity to go there, spiritually and emotionally. And she did. Tell us what it is that Kate wanted to share with us about legacy. What should our lives mean? What should be the purpose of our life's work?
Wilcox: So I'd like to share two passages from this chapter. She said, “when we strike this balance, we see that two things are true about the weight of legacy, preoccupation with the status of our future legacy makes our lives cramped and heavy, and at the same time, gentle work to improve other's lives without undue concern for our own reputation and creates the valuable legacy we naturally desire. Our legacy is a weighty matter, but it must be held lightly.” In another passage, he says, “when we are consumed with what our reputation says about us, we invite torment in our lives. When we focus instead on what we can do for others, we invite God purpose and meaningful achievement into our lives. These create legacy as a byproduct rather than the main goal.” And I think Kate lived what she preached because her friends or coworkers or mentees, after she died, have shared so many stories of the way that this is how Kate lived her life. She cared about helping others grow. She gathered people together in collaborative scholarly initiatives, she gathered people together to help them advance in their careers. She gathered people together to find and magnify the voices of women. I was involved with her on one of those projects, as was Roslynde. So in 2019, Kate and Melissa in a way both served on the imprint board for the Maxwell Institute, as well as the advisory board. And they felt like the Living Series needed more women's voices, which it still does. And they proposed the book themselves, they would co-edit a book, they were going to gather essays, and they did they gathered essays by 26 women living around the world, writing about how their faith informs their their professional vocation. And this happened in two years. That which is just stunning, because it's a very complicated editorial project, to have so many authors involved and not on native speakers of English, but such a gift to the community to have a book with so many women with women's voices. We think nothing of having a book full of all men's voices. But here's the book filled with smart, capable women who have followed inspiration that have led them to becoming presidents of universities and physicians and scientists and business women and really serving the general public in magnificent ways. I was had the privilege to work with Kate, Melissa and Rosalynde through the process of putting that book together. And, and I was just really stunned all along the way with Kate and Melissa's ability to draw out the writing of women who for the most part weren't trained to write personal essays. It's kind of a specialized genre, that even as an English literature professor myself, right, it's it's not a genre that I feel particularly well equipped to teach or write myself. But Kate and Melissa were really able to pull out the personal details and really make these essays shine. And then they stuck with the complex process of navigating the review process, processes multiple processes. And Kate and Melissa handled it with such grace, briefly, some difficult situations, or maybe we collectively we figured out these elegant solutions and I was really blessed. And I learned a lot on that project. And it was another project that we were hurrying to get done. As Kate and Melissa’s biological clock tinged loudly. We sent that book to press the Monday after her funeral. So she never held it in her hand, but she did see final copy, and the art that we commissioned for the cover and beautiful painting we commissioned for the cover. So that's just one example of the collaborative initiative. Then she was involved in many, many, many of these initiatives that have left these these monuments of women's voices at the pulpit, Every Needful Thing, she was involved with The First 50 years of Relief Society. She was working with a project that's still ongoing about the history of the young women's organization. She edited another book about women in Mormonism with Matt Bowman, I'm forgetting some things, Rosalynde.
Welch: I think that's close to it. I mean, the reality is that her life was tragically shortened and her career was tragically shortened. And the stack of books is incredibly significant. But it's not a tall stack of books, she would have gone on to do much more work. And that's part of why it has meant so much to us at the Maxwell Institute and to you and me both to be able to add this book, Both Things Are True, to that stack, and to finally allow Kate to speak in her own voice. I think it's a treasure and it took remarkable effort in the most painful of circumstances for Kate at the end of her life to make sure that this book would happen. But she did everything she needed to do to make sure that it would come to pass. Nevertheless, despite the value of the books, exponentially more value is being lived out today in the minds and the hearts of the people that she touched, the young historians that she trained. The women, as you say from all over the world who now feel like they're a part of a community. They're a part of a Latter-day Saint scholarly community because Kate and Melissa found them and invited them to contribute and taught them how to polish and prepare their pieces for publication in all the minds and hearts that she touched and she trained. That is where her legacy most truly continues. And that's exactly what she told us should be the case in this chapter. That's what she wanted. If she could go back and trade those people for more books. I don't think she would have done it. Miranda as my final question to you. I want to ask you what I ask all of our guests. I hope that listeners always take away from these interviews. something practical because I really believe that the scholarly and the practical should be close to each other. Kate study lived religion, as we've mentioned, right for her, the life of the spirit and the life of the elbows getting dirty in the garden, they were one in the same. So what practical takeaways do you think that listeners can take from Both Things Are True,
Wilcox: I was not a close friend of Kate. So I've come to know her mostly by working with Sam on his book and Kate on her editing project with Every Needful Thing, and then on Kate's book, after her death, but a conversation that I wish I had had with her, but I didn't have the opportunity to have was about vision. So Kate's cancer was initially discovered in her left eye. And she ultimately lost that eye and had to learn how to live with one eye, which is a complicated thing when you've grown up with two eyes, right? Your sense of balance and navigating the world, right vision is just like a very primary way of sensory perception. And when that's altered it really, I wanted to ask Kate, like, what happened, right? When you woke up and you only had the perspective of one eye instead of two eyes? How did that feel? In the middle of a pandemic, I started experiencing double vision, which is something you don't experience when you only have one eye. So my experience is different than Kate’s. But for me having this shift in my sensory perception, having to navigate literally two images that I see simultaneously that are dribbling around, but I know are not reliable, right. Like I know, I don't have two computer screens in front of me even though right now I see two computer screens in front of me. Like that's really shaken my confidence and my ability to perceive life. I wish I had the opportunity to talk about Kate, like, how did she make sense of this change in her body, it changed her perception of the world. And even though our experiences are different, I wish I had had the opportunity. But my onset of double vision came during a pandemic. And we were already in lockdown. And Kate was so very vulnerable at that point to infection. There never was the opportunity. But in working on this book, thinking about folding two things simultaneously together, it's, I think, given me hope, because it is so much physical, like it just is cognitively and physically draining to try to meld those images together. My eyes, I know are prisms to help me, it doesn't completely help. But it helps a little bit. But I think it gives them you some insight to just how much spiritual labor it takes to hold two images, two things simultaneously, and try to merge those together in ways that feel unified, and aren't disconcerting and disorienting. And so I think what I've learned from Kate is just one hope, and to have the endurance to just keep persisting, I may never know why my eyes are doing, what they're doing why, or even how to fix that. But I think Kate has been teaching me that it's okay, right, that that resolution might not come in mortality. But I will learn things in the process. As she learned things in the process of knowing her life was going to be much shorter than she and her family wanted. Knowing that the complexity and massive human history is it's hard is really hard to make sense of. And she chose generosity and kindness and ethical sensibility. And she prioritized relationships and friendships, and building a community and being faithful to that community. And until all of those things give me a lot of courage and a lot of hope and I'm really grateful that I've had the opportunity to work on on her book. So thank you for this opportunity to talk.
Welch: Miranda, I'm so moved by what you've just shared. I can't think of a more powerful and more faithful endorsement of Kate's life and of her work in this book. So thank you for being with us today on the podcast.
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