“In itself, doubt is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on what you do with it.”
| Letters to a Young Mormon
“Why would God go out of his way to hide evidence and make his own (world-historically pivotal) message more obscure and less credible? Or even more to the point, what about God’s own absence? Why put us in the same weak position as Lehi? Why give us a text, at least twice removed from God himself, rather than give us some kind of direct interaction with God? Is this a game or a test? Is God just testing us to see if we’ll believe things that we don’t have good evidence for? If this is the case, then what is God testing for, credulity? Is credulity the measure of a life, the litmus test for salvation? In effect, is God saying, ‘You’re welcome to join me in eternal bliss, but only if you’re willing to believe (in exactly the right way) things that I intentionally and unnecessarily made it really hard to understand and believe?’ I don’t buy it. I don’t buy this version of the story.”
| Future Mormon, p. 21
At some point, God will ask you to sacrifice on his altar, not only your stories about your own life, but your version of his stories as well. Your softly lit watercolor felt-board version of scripture stories and church history must, like all your stories, be abandoned at his feet, and the messy, vibrant, and inconvenient truths that characterize God’s real work with real people will have to take center stage. If they don’t, then how will God’s work in your hungry messy, and inconvenient life ever do the same?
When God knocks, don’t creep to the door and look through the peephole to see if he looks like you thought he would. Rush to the door and throw it open.
| Letters to a Young Mormon By Adam Miller
Moral creativity does not mean making up new morals. God’s law is God’s law. Rather, moral creativity has to do with the kind of creativity needed in order to be moral. It has to do with the kind of creativity needed to break bad habits. Or the kind needed to breathe life back into broken relationships. Or the kind needed to unbalance cycles of anger or violence. Or the kind needed to see past prejudices. Or the kind needed to be something more.
I won’t deny that it is possible for our restless hearts to find rest in God, but I do want to deny that this rest results from the satisfaction of our desires. God does not save us from our hungers by satisfying them. God saves us from the tyranny of our desires by saving us from the impossible work of satisfying them.
| Future Mormon: Essays in Mormon Theology By Adam Miller
“We don’t have to work our way into grace; we have to stop working so hard to pretend we aren’t already in it”
| Future Mormon
“The point of the law is love. And while obedience is generally better than disobedience, obedience in itself cannot fulfill the law. Only love can fulfill the law. However, love is a curious end for a law. Normally, the point of a law is to compel obedience, not love. As a result, making love the point of the law introduces a kind of know– a kind of torsion or structural catch 22– into the heart of the law itself because love if compelled, is no longer love. Love that is not freely given is not love. Love, as the end of the law, divides the law against itself. Love hamstrings the law in relation to its own assigned end because the law, working to compel obedience, cannot, in this instance, be fulfilled by way of obedience. It can instead, only be fulfilled by love that the law cannot– and must not– compel. The law must compromise its own integrity in order to achieve its assigned end.”
| Future Mormon
Work, chained to its outcome, is misery. Do what you can, do it better than you’re able, and let things happen as they may. The action, not its fruit, is your business. The outcome is not your concern. If God is going to show himself to you in the work that you shoulder, he will only do so if you’ve stopped craving an approving audience and, instead, work out your own salvation.
In addition to arguing that the differences between men and women are real and important and spiritually significant, the Proclamation also boldly claims that men and women are intended by divine design to be equal partners. . . . It seems increasingly obvious to me that in our day, defending the family means rooting out our world’s misogyny. Defending the family means defending women from both the subtle and violent forms of degradation, abuse, and marginalization that riddle our world. It means taking seriously, perhaps for the first time in the history of the world, the solemn declaration that God intends men and women to be equal partners. In my view, this will be the defining moral issue of our generation.
| "'Letters to a Young Mormon' Unplugged"
Love is a fundamentally creative act. Love creates and recreates lives and worlds. Love depends on learning how to bend our ordinary lives, like a poet bends and saves ordinary words into creative and morally responsive shapes. In this sense, love is an ethical practice with a deeply aesthetic dimension. Love doesn’t just require justice and mercy, it requires beauty and creativity.
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