Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart

A collection of essays from accomplished academics and professionals who speak about discipleship not only with their minds but also from their hearts. Instead of pushing us to choose between faith and reason, love and law, truth within the restored gospel and truth in the wider world of God’s children, these writers urge us to seek “anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report” and learn to live in a world of complexity and abundance. With humility and openness that makes their specialized work accessible to a general reader, these authors model how to live life as a whole person. They relate the twists and turns of their intellectual and spiritual journeys, giving readers confidence to make their own ways and to pursue “every needful thing” (D&C 88:119).

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye received AB and PhD degrees from Harvard University. She is a senior lecturer in Asian studies at the University of Auckland and a historian at the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is the author of China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church and Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer & Motherhood.

Kate Holbrook has a BA from Brigham Young University, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD from Boston University. At the time of her death (2022), Kate was the Academic Outreach Director at the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she focused on women’s history. Kate’s books include The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History, Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, and At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women.