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.
It is a mistake to think that Mormonism is about Mormonism. Mormonism is not about Mormonism. And if we try to force Mormonism to be about itself, we paint ourselves into corners and lose track of the very thing we are trying to say. . . . In my experience, Mormonism comes into focus as true and living only when I stop looking directly at it and instead aim my attention at Christ. Instead of aiming at Mormonism, I have to aim what Mormonism is aiming at. Otherwise, I’ll miss what matters most.
| Letters to a Young Mormon' Unplugged
“Grace doesn’t grease the wheels of the law. Grace isn’t God’s way of jury rigging a broken law. It’s the other way around. The law is just one small cog in a world animated entirely–from top to bottom, from beginning to end–by grace.”
| Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans
“Grace is original. Grace is what comes first, and it is sin that then comes in response. Or creating is what comes first, and it is the fall that then comes in response. Sin at root, is a rejection of what God by way of creation, has given as a grace.”
| Future Mormon
“Why would we suppress God’s grace? Because it scares us. What God gives is beyond our control, much of it is difficult to receive, and a lot of it fails to line up with what we thought we wanted. More, because we’re incapable of receiving, all at once, everything that God wants to give, God can only give a few things at a time. And because God can only give a few things at a time, all of God’s giving also arrives as the passing away of what was previously given. That is, all of God’s giving arrives as a kind of taking.”
| Future Mormon
“Faith is more like being faithful to your husband or wife than it is like believing in magic. Fidelity is key. You may fall in love with someone because of how well they complement your story, but you’ll prove yourself faithful to them only when you care more for the flawed, difficult, and unplotted life you end up sharing with them. Faith isn’t the opposite of knowledge. Rather, like love, faith perfects knowledge by practicing fidelity to it.”