Frances Lee Menlove - On Institutional and Individual Honesty

It is impossible for the Church to face the great problems and threats of our age without individual members being free to express to themselves and to others what they think and believe. With the almost unlimited possibility for new scientific discoveries, new sociological and anthropological insights, new ways of explaining human behavior, modern man cannot escape perplexity. "What the Church needs today, as always, are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are no less than their passion for truth; men who brave every misunderstanding and attack as they bear witness; men who, in a word, love the Church more than ease and the unruffled course of their personal destiny." The members of the Church are responsible for the Church.

 -Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1966), pg.53

My confession is to acknowledge my awareness of the many linguistic, historical, and theological difficulties that arise as one attempts to analyze such documents as the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon, and also as one tries to take account of the Mormon (or any faith's) past.  Both my professional study and my continuing attempts to conform my private life to the requirements of the scriptures have led me to this awareness.  I have reconciled many of these difficulties, not reconciled others, and have suspended judgment on certain of them.  Most are explicable if one approaches them not from the perpective that the church is essentially divine, marred only by the weakness of human administrators, but rather that the Church on earth consists entirely of human beings (with all their limitations) who are trying to respond to the divine with which they have been touched.  The distinction is crucial, for the second conception is an inversion of the first.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 239) A Thoughtful Faith

"What the hell is his problem?" Richard asked.
"It doesn't matter what his problem is, until he's fully understood it himself," the man said.

-Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son (pg. 20)