A Review of "The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life"

January 15, 2013 by Rosalynde Welch

Continued from Page 2

To this question the answer is unequivocally "yes." It is not a comprehensive or even a representative treatment; to be that it would, for starters, have to add an additional chapter substituting "obedience" for every instance of "belief" or "faith." (Try reading the book's introduction with this substitution: it works surprisingly well!) Nevertheless, the book drills down to bedrock Mormon scripture, it finds Mormonism's best gifts to Christianity and highlights its most humane and moving images and narratives.

Indeed, the book's Mormon character goes much deeper than the themes it expresses with such brio. One way of understanding Mormonism is as a kind of sacralizing tool, a cultural urim and thummim: a system of ideas capable of importing ordinary selves and stories from a host culture, twisting a thread of gold through each, and re-weaving them back into the sacred fabric of the cosmos. In this sense, The God Who Weeps is an enactment of Mormonism itself, a virtuoso performance in making religion for the 21st century. This is religion that makes itself relevant in a comprehensible universe fully surrendered to science; religion for a culture in which religious claims are contested but the authority of personal choice is taken for granted; religion for Heavenly Parents with a copy of Love & Logic on their bedside table; religion for humans who enjoy an historically unprecedented degree of personal autonomy and efficacy over their daily destinies.

Any quarrel I have with The God Who Weeps is at root probably a quarrel with the world for which—and from which—it makes religion. It's hardly fair to hold the authors responsible for that. In fact, I can't think of anybody better suited than Fiona and Terryl Givens for the task. Their book, however different in sensibility from mine, is infused with their personal generosity, compassion, intelligence, and optimism. The worldview it describes—lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy—is one of the good fruits of Mormonism.

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About Rosalynde Welch

Rosalynde Welch is an independent scholar who makes her home in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and four children.

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