Re-release of Maxwell Institute Podcast #169: Where Do We Start to Build Zion? Featuring Melissa Inouye

Rosalynde Welch: Melissa Wei -Tsing Inouye, our longtime associate at the Maxwell Institute, died on April 23rd, 2024. We join with many in mourning her loss and celebrating the remarkable legacy she left in the form of books, articles, and lots and lots of podcasts and videos. Melissa was a gifted speaker, warm, funny, faithful, and so smart.

We wanted to re-release some of the Maxwell Institute interviews and lectures she delivered over the years. In this 2023 interview on her book, Sacred Struggle, Finding Christ on the Path of Most Resistance, Melissa and I talked about the ways that our collective struggles to build Zion can help us grow toward our divine potential. I especially loved her insight that over the course of history, many people have had visions and seen angels. What's remarkable about our faith tradition is not only its supernatural origins, but the fact that our church has held together over generations. We've somehow figured out how to get along well enough to survive and grow. And that is remarkable. Melissa attributes this strength to our doctrine of Zion.

She invites us to update our idea of service to include listening carefully to our brothers and sisters who may be different from us. I hope you enjoyed this interview with our beloved friend, the one of a kind, Melissa Inouye.

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.

The year 2023 has brought devastating fires in Hawaii, Chile, and Canada. Speaking of these tragedies, Elder Quentin L. Cook recently observed that life has never been easy for followers of Jesus Christ, nor was it easy for the Savior to faithfully fulfill his mortal mission. He continued, "We lament things that will not be accomplished and songs that will not be sung." To listeners in Maui, BioBio, and British Columbia, we lament with you. Sometimes life on the covenant path feels like waiting upstream against a fierce current. Life's resistance is the topic of my guest Melissa Inouye's new book, "Sacred Struggle, Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance." Dr. Inouye works in the church history department where she specializes in global Christianity and the global Latter-day Saint tradition. Her new book draws on both her professional expertise and her personal experience to think about why and how and what to do when life is just hard. The book is divided into three sections, struggles that result from human bodies and agency, the sacredness of our fellow creatures, and the imperative to build Zion. In each case, Melissa shows how sources of resistance can transform us into beings more like our Heavenly Parents, wiser, more loving, and more aware of the entire human family. At the same time, she manages never to romanticize or minimize suffering. She's honest about anguish. But she's tenacious in clinging to our vision of Zion. One of the things I enjoyed most about this book is Dr. Inouye's love of the scriptures. She turns often to scripture for truth and encouragement, and she has a way of finding new meaning in familiar words. I decided to organize our conversation around a few of the most interesting scripture discussions in the book, and I think you'll be surprised and enlightened at what she's found.

Melissa Inouye, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Melissa Inouye: Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor.

Welch: Today we are talking about the lone and dreary world. We're talking about the toil and the sweat that it takes just to make our way through this world that we live in. We're talking about struggle. And in particular, we're talking about your new book, Melissa, which is titled, Sacred Struggle, Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance. So I thought today we'd explore this wonderful book by looking at some of the scriptures that you cite throughout, seeing how you apply them concretely to our life together in the church. I think this is what you're best at as a thinker, is going from the abstract to the concrete and looking at the applications. So in the introduction to the book, you offer a reading of a story that we can find in Mark 10, which is the story of the rich young ruler who meets Christ. So I wondered if you would tell us, review that story for us and tell us how it sets the tone for the major themes in your book.

Inouye: That sounds great. How about I just read all five verses because it's not actually that long. It's Mark chapter 10 verse 17 through 22. And I'll just say that this passage of scripture has been really influential in my spiritual life ever since I was a young missionary. But I thought, I started to think about it kind of differently very recently. So I'll just start from chapter 10 verse 17.

And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running and kneeled to him and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God. Thou knowest the commandments. Do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, defraud not, honor thy father and mother. And he, the young man, answered and said unto him, Master, all these have I observed for my youth.

Then Jesus beholding him loved him and said unto him, one thing thou lackest, go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor and thou shall have treasure in heaven and come take up the cross and follow me. And he was sad at that saying and went away grieved for he had great possessions. Now this story turns up in three of the gospels and in some of the versions the young man asks outright what lack I yet? And Jesus tells him in each story. And he's unable to do what Jesus prescribes. And when I was a young missionary, I loved the story because I thought Jesus was an incredible being to be able to just look at someone and love them. Then I started to rethink what the scripture means. And a couple of things kind of changed for me in the first place. I never thought that I was like this person in the story. I thought I was kind of off the hook. This is not a story about me because I'm not a rich young ruler in Jerusalem. I'm not rich. I don't have any political authority and you know, I'm not standing right there in front of Jesus.

But then as I started to study history and to think about the opportunities that people have had over time, I started to realize that I am way more privileged economically, even maybe politically in some ways. So, I'm actually richer and ruler-ier than that person in the story. So that kind of gives me pause. And then the second thing that I noticed about the story is that it's not an

exceptional story. It's not like a story where that kind of breaks the pattern of the stories that we tell about Jesus. It's a very standard story, which is that some person or people who have a need come physically to Jesus. They come before him. He sees them. He loves them. And he kind of in a moment diagnoses what they need. And then he gives them what they need. So for example, we have the individual called Blind Bartimaeus in the scriptures. And he had this physical disability that severely limited his mobility, his available, his economic situation, his security, everything. And he came to Jesus and he called to him and he asked to be able to see. And Jesus saw him and Jesus heard him and Jesus gave him his sight.

And the same pattern is going on here with the so-called rich young ruler. Someone, he runs up to Jesus. He kneels down. Jesus looks at him and loves him, sees what he needs. In this case, he even asks, what do I need? And, and then Jesus prescribes something, which is give everything away and come follow me. And the rich young ruler can't do it. And he goes away sad and Jesus is left sad. So that made me think a little bit. The rich young ruler had a problem that was pretty different from most of the problems that we see in scripture. This person's problem was that he had too much. We call him a rich young ruler, which means that he had not earned his money through years and years of hard work. He had been born into money. He was a ruler, so he had the experience of kind of lording power over other people, but he didn't know how it felt to be powerless, to be helpless and marginalized. So he was kind of missing out on a lot of the aspects of humanity that humanity experiences. What the young man lacked was lack itself. And sometimes even like within a Latter-day Saint context, it might be possible to, to have a life or to have a section of your life where you're just fine and everything was awesome. And everyone thought you were the best and you believed it all. And in those kinds of situations, like you're just not going to hunger and thirst after righteousness. And you're not going to grow in the same way that you grow when it's the opposite and you feel like you're the worst and nothing's working and help has not come and so on. So, so I just think that was a very interesting prescription that Jesus issued that person, which casts light, I think, on the larger Latter-day Saint theology of the plan of salvation, which is the whole point of life is to come to this physical world to receive a body and to learn and grow.

Welch: Yeah. So you talk about something called the prosperity gospel, which is this idea that if we're keeping the commandments, things are going to go great for us. That a good life is rewarded with an easy life, right? And an abundant life. And you're saying if we really read the story of the rich young ruler carefully, what we're going to see is something like the opposite. That Jesus saw what was needed and what this young man needed was more struggle, less prosperity more struggle. Sometimes the struggle is just what is needed. That doesn't mean that we want more of it. It doesn't mean that we don't try to help those who are struggling. But sometimes the struggle, always in fact, the struggle is what's needed to make us more like our heavenly parents. A little later in the book, you turn to a really interesting passage in Abraham chapter three. And I have to confess, I have never really understood this passage. It's the beginning of chapter three, and usually we quote from the end of Abraham three. But the beginning of Abraham three is where the Lord is teaching Abraham all about astronomy. And there's all sorts of new words. And it's kind of confusing to follow what he's saying about all the different planets and stars. And a lot of people, including me, sometimes probably just skip through it to the good part. But you decided to stay with the hard part at the beginning of that chapter. And you came up with a really, really compelling and new interpretation of what in the world the Lord is trying to teach Abraham here at the beginning of Abraham three. So, walk us through your reading of this chapter.

Inouye: So, the really cool term that comes up over and over again in some of these early passages in Abraham chapter three is the word reckoning. And reckoning is very interesting because reckoning emphasizes kind of subjectivity, right? Like I reckon he's coming in pretty soon. It shows like you're guessing. It shows that I, Melissa, am kind of making a educated guess about something or an estimate. And my reckoning might be different from your reckoning it emphasizes the fact that we see these things differently. It depends on where we are. There's this kind of built in difference. I think that this emphasis on reckoning helps us to understand the significance of perspective. Everyone has a different point of view. And when you look at something from one person's point of view or one body's point of view, it's different. That's just a fact.

The next thing I think we see in this passage is two-ness. There's, for example, in verse six, Abraham, these two facts exist. There's this emphasis on two over and over again, and this idea that there's always two things kind of in relation to each other. And the third thing that we hear is that even though these things are always kind of different from each other, they're like, way different from God. So for example, 19, the Lord sent to me these two facts to exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other, there shall be another more intelligent than they. I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all. Now I've heard this scripture used in a kind of supremacist kind of way, to say that like, well, then clearly God is saying that like some people are more intelligent than the other. But I don't think that's what this is saying in the larger context of the universe in perspective. I think it's saying intelligence means, of course, not like mental acuity. According to God, intelligence is light and truth as we learn in the Doctrine and Covenants. So we're all differing in our growth in light and truth. Sometimes like, you're just kind of at an ebb in your light and truthness. Other times you're doing better, but always, we're all at different points in how much light and truth we have. And like compared to God, it's like nothing. We're all basically the same. I think that's really significant too, because God shows Abraham,everything, shows in verse 12, God says, my son, my son. His hand was stretched out, behold, I will show you all these. And he put his hand upon mine eyes. And I saw those things which his hands had made for many, and they multiplied before mine eyes, and I could not see the end thereof. So we have this like incredible scene this nearly, this infinite, all-powerful being, putting a physical hand over the eyes of a physical person. And that person sees the whole universe and then God starts to just like name the individual heavenly bodies. So this incredible juxtaposition of vastness and intimacy at the same time. And I think all of those things coming together help explain why life is so hard, help explain why life is full of tension, why we're always bumping up against each other, why it's so hard for us to kind of sympathize with each other and see each other's problems. You don't have that hand over our eyes so much all the time. You know, God can see everyone and name them all. We're so limited in our capacity. Our light and truth is so flickering and small sometimes compared to what God has. Sometimes we just feel little and tiny and squished. But at other times, we kind of catch that vision, divine vision, and we can see vastness and boundlessness and we can see or somehow feel like each other's souls. And I remember this testimony meeting that I was attending when my kids were babies. And the speaker was speaking and everyone was listening and they were sharing something with a little vulnerability. And I felt the Spirit. And I could just tell in that moment that other people were feeling the Spirit. We were feeling the same thing that the speaker was feeling. We were all kind of connecting and we were becoming this like vast superhuman organism, right? That was like experiencing life in this totally elevated, transcendent way. It was really cool. And it taught me a lot about what it means to invite the Spirit and to feel the Spirit.

Welch: I love that reading. Abraham thought he was being instructed in astronomy, but he's actually being instructed in anthropology as you show us, right? Each person has his or her own frame of reference, and it's unique to his or her position in life and experience and intrinsic qualities. And yet, those different frames of reference are meant to come into contact with each other comparatively. And that's hard because they're incompatible, right? Sort of inherently, they're incompatible in our natural state. So the divine power comes in these moments where we're able to transcend that. And God's greatness, as you say, God's greatness shows us that, although this difference is real, it's not insuperable. And we shouldn't make an idol of it, right? Difference is real. It shouldn't surprise us or scare us when we encounter it in our real life and somebody has a different perspective than us and they won't change it, no matter how persuasive I might be. That shouldn't surprise us. But we don't need to make an idol of that. And we don't need to rest there. We can continue seeking and nourishing one another and keep striving for those moments where there's something greater that comes into view. And I think this is sort of what you're getting at when you talk about a very familiar scripture from the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, verse 30, where the Lord calls His church the true and living church. And you use the scripture to help us understand how it is that, as church members, we can be in communion with one another, even when we might be dramatically or even like diametrically opposed to the views and perspectives of our brother or sister. So help us understand what you mean by true and living.

Inouye: So I think that the thing about living organizations and movements in churches is that they, the good thing about them is that they're usually made out of people who have managed to survive together without killing each other or falling apart for a long period of time, which you may not think is a big deal. But as a religious historian, I think it's a big deal because for us, you know, someone seeing God or having a vision or being transported to some other magical state, that's like everyone does that. That happens all the time. What doesn't happen all the time is for a community to stay together over generations and over space. That's very impressive. It's like a miracle. And there has to be something special. And the people had to have figured out how to get along with each other for that long too, because it's not easy for people to stay together. So I prize the livingness of our church. Now, the problem with a living church, having talked about the great thing about it, because it's real, not just this made up thing on paper that you then go enforce on other people. Like the gospel is not something you enforce, right? Jesus was not an enforcer. Like Jesus had this gift that he gave freely, right? The problem with the living church is that it involves people who I've just said are wonderful, but who can also be awful and really different and super annoying. But Jesus lived in a world of conflict. Jesus was speaking to a people who were marginalized and colonized, who had to do what Roman guards said, who were often mistreated, sometimes persecuted, sometimes just kicked out of their home. Nowadays, I think we don't experience that quite as much. And maybe we've kind of lost some of the context. And we have maybe started to feel like the purpose of Christianity is to feel really comfortable about where we are, but I don't think that's what Jesus was doing. And it's certainly more admirable probably to like, if a Roman soldier forces you to carry a burden, the soldier who's colonizing you to go further with that person and help this person who's your colonizer and your enemy. It is probably like fundamentally more admirable to do that than it is to listen to the political spiel of someone who has an opposite point of view from you politically. I do think it's useful to do that. I've argued in the past that conversations are like casseroles. So like if someone needs help, like, oh no, someone had a baby or someone's feeling sick, then it's really easy to just kind of whip up some food and take it over. That's like a standard knee jerk response. But what's not quite as standard or knee jerk is if someone expresses an opinion that you feel comfortable with, and just like sit there and listen to them and try to understand them. That's, it's hard for us to do that. But it takes about the same amount of time, like, you know, half an hour, maybe it takes less time. So maybe we should just subject ourselves to that psychological inconvenience since we're able to subject ourselves to culinary inconvenience, because it's like, it's a good, it's like a gift you can give someone.

Welch: I was delighted by Dr. Inouye’s suggestion that we should pass around clipboards and sign up, not to bring meals to a family in need, but to listen and try to understand someone whose view is uncomfortably different than yours. Giving someone your attention is as much a gift as giving a meal or a ride. It's inconvenient and uncomfortable, yes, but as Elder Holland has taught, echoing the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Christian discipleship is meant to be costly.”

In the second half of the interview, Melissa introduces a fantastic new resource on the Church website, the global histories, which are personal stories about faith and discipleship from the stakes of Zion stretched ever wider around the world. She talks about her favorite tree in New Zealand. And of course I ask her about better questions when it comes to building Zion at home, wherever we are.

The thing I love the most, the insight I love the most about the true and living church is your point that something living is real. It's not a fantasy, it's not a dream, it's not a blueprint, but it's real. And so it has to be implementable in real life. And reality is always more complicated and grittier and messier, but also more resilient and more enduring and more tenacious than things that only exist on paper or in our minds. I love what you say, what you write in the book. The church is not a solution for diversity, but a preserve in which to practice it. So we don't go to church to like finally solve diversity so that now we're all thinking the same. We go to church so that we can practice living in this divinely ordained diversity. One source of division that we might have to contend with in our church life, of course, is, you referenced this several times in the book, is political division and political difference with members of our wards. But there's a much broader global perspective as well. And there are deep differences in sort of fundamental background worldview, globally speaking, between the developed Western world and other places in the world. One of the things I love about the book is that you often cite a group of texts that are not scripture, but they can be found in the Gospel Library app. And that is a resource called the Global Histories. And my understanding is that it's pretty new. So I wanted you to share with our readers, what are these global histories? Why should we use it? And then maybe share with us something that you've taken from this resource that has been important in your spiritual life.

Inouye: The global histories are like the 21st century Doctrine and Covenants. So just as the saints of the 19th century had all these tribulations and could kind of hear the Lord speaking directly to them and had that recorded by their names or by the trials they were going through in this Book of Commandments, in this record, the 21st century global histories are records of God's dealings with people all over the world wherever the saints are. And it's tremendously significant. And I cite it so much in my book because it totally changes my perspective. For instance, it brings into question, what do we really mean when I say I am a child of God? And what does it mean when we say, well, I'm trying to become like God, who is the parent of everyone. We have very strong feelings because of our national identity or our political identity. It's just inevitable that we have these huge differences in moral common sense, even among Latter-day Saints, who believe in things like honesty and love and charity and service. The application of all of those ideals, those values can be wildly different based on circumstances that make sense to everyone on the ground. So that's a big problem. But I think if you really believe that people are children of God, then we just have to agree that this is a problem that we're just going to have to grapple with forever because there's no way around it. Like, if everyone's a child of God, then we just have to figure out how to live with those differences. And the global histories provide us with this perspective on the different ways in which the gospel works in people's lives. It provides us with ways in which we see miracles happening.

My favorite story for me, which I cite in the book is the story of Agnes Tua-Giramarie in Rwanda who saw tragically during the Rwandan genocide, saw a neighbor kill several members of her family just right in front of her in a brutal and horrible way. And for years she had to live with those horrific images with that horrific memory, with this deep anger, this feeling of depression. And she later at the university lived with a cousin who was a Latter-day Saint and encountered the Latter-day Saint community, found them to be a group of people who seemed to be trying really hard to be good and was attracted to that and eventually joined the church and through her kind of growing understanding of the Atonement and growing understanding of Jesus and what Jesus offers us, she felt finally one day that she could forgive this person who had killed so many members of her family. And to me, that's a pretty powerful testimony of the power of the gospel and our particular interpretation of the gospel and the Latter-day Saint community. And then just like the love of God in a particular place. And those kinds of stories also make my struggles seem pretty small and petty. And you know, I think, well, the things that I need help with in my life are kind of small, but that was a really heavy lift. And wow, like I'm just in awe that the gospel can change someone's life like that and that kind of perspective orients me I think more correctly towards the, I want to say like the sources of power or the value of power or the proper use of divine power in the world. Maybe we just have to struggle with all the political fighting and posturing and campaigning like on our own is like this derivative seventh degree human activity. But like the key activity is, you know, how do God's children see God's hand in their lives and how does it transform them and strengthen them through really difficult things which are inherent to everyone's life.

Welch: There’s a statement you make in the conclusion of the book that I copied into my permanent document of favorite quotes, and it's this one. “The worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves and that makes no difference for good in the lives of others. Now, that would be a powerful statement coming from anybody's mouth, but Melissa, that's even more powerful to me coming from you because you've seen some pretty terrible things. You've experienced a lot of things that I would probably consider the worst thing that could happen, but you're saying, no, there's something worse. What would be even worse than the struggle I've been through is to live a life that doesn't require struggle and that doesn't involve me with other people.

But I wondered now as we are moving towards the end of this interview, if you would talk to us a little bit about one of those defining struggles in your life and that is your battle with cancer. You have a tree that you love in Auckland, New Zealand where you used to live, a Pohutakaua tree. Tell us a little bit about that tree, what it means to you and how it has strengthened you through some of the darkest periods of your life.

Inouye: Well, this tree is super cool because its limbs grow sideways along the ground. Like, pohutukawas can be really tall trees, like 25, 30 meter trees. So that's like, you know, 75 feet, you know, they can be really tall trees. But this pohutukawa is really big, but it's so low to the ground. The kids can climb around like monkeys in the very uppermost branches and then like jump down shrieking to nice soft turf like five feet below. It's just awesome. And the reason why it's so awesome is because it almost died because it somehow at one point when it was pretty mature, it split in half. And just each half fell to the ground. And you would think that would do the tree in but it just kept its roots there and it kept on drinking water and eating sun. And it's miraculously survived. And now because of the horrible thing that happened to it, it's like the awesomest tree in the whole domain, and accessible to people in a way that other trees simply aren't accessible. So I think sometimes our struggles, while horrible and painful and no one ever wishes for them ever, make us more accessible, like just little things. Like, you know, when you have been really weak, you know that someone who is also going through something might want a chair with a back instead of a picnic bench to sit on. Just little things like that. I think when people have, you know, everyone can think of something that's happened to them that's made them, like, more sensitive to that issue in other people, you can spot it. Once it's happened to you, you can spot it in others. If you, for example, had a mental illness, you're probably a lot better at seeing it in other people's faces than someone who's never had those feelings. So in some ways we become a lot more accessible to people. We become a lot more useful and of course, I'm not saying that our feelings don't matter and the only thing that we should do is try to be useful. But I'm just saying if we really believe in the plan of salvation and that the point is to come to earth to learn, grow to become like God, it just stands to reason that we need to experience all the things that humans experience if possible.

And if I could choose to not do them again, I probably would choose to not do them. But we just don't have that choice. That's how life works. We're just thrust into these situations and we just have to keep drinking water and eating sunlight, like the tree.

Welch: Like the tree, keep drinking water and eating sun.

Melissa, I am so glad that you are still drinking water and eating sun. I hope you're eating some food too. Maybe some miso soup every once in a while hits the spot.

Inouye: Pistachio ice cream.

Welch: Pistachio ice cream, yes. As we wrap up our interview today, the theme of this season of the Maxwell Institute is asking better questions. We're talking about how to approach a difficult topic or a wonderful topic and ask the question that is going to bring forth the most insightful answer. So I ask all my guests this, how can we ask better questions as Latter-day Saints? And maybe what's a bad question that we might ask about building Zion? And what would be a better question? How can we reframe our mindset to ask a better question about living together as Saints and striving toward this ideal of Zion?

nouye: Okay, well, I'm gonna give you a kind of specific response. Maybe tell me if this is like too much. A bad question is, what can I do to help? Because it puts the burden of prescribing the particular chore or job or whatever on the person who's like already suffering and embarrassed and kind of feeling marginalized and not sure about how much people like them. So for example, what if you say, well, you could blah, but then it turns out the person who asked the question, what can I do to help? Doesn't even really wanna do that thing that you have thought they could do to help. That's so embarrassing. And it's like, it just puts you in this impossible like, kind of, so usually when people say, what can I do to help? The people who are suffering usually say, I'm fine because the question is a burden.

So a better question is I have a bunch of frozen minestrone soup, a house cleaning person who's going to come and clean your house for an hour, or taking your kid out to the trampoline park to jump like mad for an hour, A, B, or C. Which one do you prefer? That's a better question. Because you have removed the burden of, you know, what is there? What am I willing to do? Or, what is possible or, you know, all of that from the person. And you've just like said, these are three things I could do and I will totally do them. Which one? All of them, none of them, you know, like what would be helpful? And even like, even if none of them are good by like suggesting those three things, you kind of like shown the direction that you're going. And then it would be easier for that person to ask you for something like that in the future. Does that make sense? So when we're building Zion, we want to be really kind and helpful to each other. But because we're trained to kind of serve and because we know that life is hard, everyone's struggling with stuff. No one wants to like, you know, ask someone to like pick up a big bag of green dog food from the store when that's something I could totally do myself as a fully functioning adult, you know? It's hard to just say, what can I do to help? So don't ask that question. Ask much more specific questions.

Welch: Get specific, take the burden of imagination on yourself rather than putting it on the person who's already struggling, and then signal your willingness to go to where they are and to be what they need you to be at that moment. Does that about sum it up?

Inouye: I think so. And that, like what you say, the burden of imagination, that takes a little work, right? You have to think about their family, their kids young, you know, how much did their spouse work? And it shows a little more care because you have taken some of that burden on yourself.

Welch: And it's amazing to think that these small interpersonal actions within our wards, within our neighborhoods that put together in one vast network like all the stars in the sky that the Lord showed Abraham, that is the quality of Zion. And that's how we build this global worldwide fellowship of flourishing and love. It's through these interpersonal, one-on-one interactions with the people in our ward.

Inouye: Right, it's not through like speaking with the tongues of angels. It's through playing with someone's kid when they can't do it themselves.

Welch: Melissa Inouye, thank you so much for talking with us today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Inouye: Thanks so much for having me.

Welch: Thanks for listening to the Maxwell Institute podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and give us a rating or review on the platform where you listened. For updates about the Maxwell Institute, follow us on our social media platforms @byumaxwell and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu.edu. Join us next time, and take care.