Terryl and Fiona Givens

Quotes by authors Terryl and Fiona Givens

“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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“The vocabulary of sin and guilt and damnation has too often overwhelmed the restored gospel’s message of absolute love and powerfully grounded hopefulness. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, summarizing the almost universal misapprehension of overanxious Saints among us, we must learn to ‘distinguish more clearly between divine discontent and the devil’s dissonance, between dissatisfaction with self and disdain for self. We need the first and must shun the second. When conscience calls to us from the next ridge,’ he wrote, her purpose is to beckon not to scold.

“Rather than continuing to frame our lives in terms of deficiency and inadequacy, we would benefit from the perspective of Irenaeus, who emphasized the forward-looking process in which we should be engaged: becoming ‘perfected after the image and likeness of God.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“The story is told of a church official who returned from installing a new stake presidency. ‘Dad, do you Brethren feel confident when you call a man as the stake president that he is the Lord’s man?’ the official’s son asked upon his father’s return home. ‘No, not always,’ he replied. ‘But once we call him, he becomes the Lord’s man.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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“What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps

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“In an 1831 revelation, the Lord told Joseph Smith that most of the world was under sin, ‘except those which I have reserved unto myself, holy men that ye know not of.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens

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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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“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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“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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