Terryl and Fiona Givens

Quotes by authors Terryl and Fiona Givens

“I think the greatest benefit that can be derived from an honest doubt is the recognition that in the final analysis, we choose to believe. For somebody who has seen that there are reasons to doubt and reasons to believe, and yet make a free choice to affirm their belief, you can see that that is a wonderful position to be in, to recognize that this is something I chose, it’s not something I was compelled by the evidence to accept. It’s something that out of a free heart I choose to embrace. Now, I think that that’s an advantage known only to those who have passed through the crucible of doubt.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The Crucible of Doubt

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“Even recognizing the extent of our unexamined assumptions can be the hardest thing of all. It is like asking a fish what it is like to be wet. ‘What is wet?’ even a miraculously verbal fish would reply. Our assumptions, like the ocean in which a fish swims, are the invisible background to our thinking, waking existence.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The Crucible of Doubt

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“We have become accustomed to equating testimony with certainty and knowledge, and we use the language of certainty–I know the church is true, I know this, I know that–and it may be that in fact the silent majority as members of the congregation may very well feel unqualified or unable to affirm that they know the church to be true. We are simply trying to add our voices to those of the brethren like Elder Holland, to the effect that we need to be more accommodating and embracing of those in our midst who feel that they want to express the desire to believe without being able to express the certainty.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The Crucible of Doubt

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“Granting opportunity only to those who accept Christ in the flesh seems patently unfair and inefficient. Giving amnesty to all the rest of humankind makes of Christ’s life and sacrifice a magnificent gesture but a superfluous or redundant one. A reasonable conception of God and His plan for us demands a third option.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps

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“Doubt, for us, leads to the capacity to ask genuine questions, and a genuine question is a question born out of sincerity and a yearning to know.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The Crucible of Doubt

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“It is about failing to see the family structure as a divine mode of eternal association that is at the very heart of heaven itself. In sum, the ‘Restoration’ is not about correcting particular doctrines or practices as much as it is about restoring their cosmic context.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“We would have been inexpressibly more miserable, if we had retained the memory of our former glory, and past actions.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps

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“The pressure to conform to what we see as a dominant cultural orthodoxy is often more imagined than real. A silent majority may be more receptive than we realize to our yearnings for greater authenticity, honesty, originality, and individualism. Brigham Young was. ‘I am not a stereotyped Latter Day Saint,’ he said, ‘and do not believe in the doctrine. Away with stereotyped ‘Mormons!'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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“We are not born good or evil. We are born free.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps (p.49)

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“In Salt Lake’s old Thirteenth Ward, Bishop Edwin D. Woolley frequently found himself at odds with President Brigham Young. On a certain occasion, as they ended one such fractious encounter, Young had a final parting remark: ‘Now, Bishop Woolley, I guess that you will go off and apostatize.’ To which the bishop rejoined, ‘If this were your church, President Young, I would be tempted to do so. But this is just as much my church as it is yours, and why should I apostatize from my own church?’ That sense of ownership, or, better, of full and equal membership in the body of Christ, was Bishop Woolley’s salvation.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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