Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye: “God's Sandbox: Believing and Belonging in a broken world”

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Event Description:  When life gets scary and overwhelming, they say, turn to God--to faith--to Church. So I did this, and what happened? Everything got 99.98 times scarier and more overwhelming. When society blows you this way and that, they say, cleave fast to the gospel culture. So I did this, and what happened? The thing I was clutching swelled enormously, then exploded in a thousand different directions. So when death came for me, I sat down in God's hellish sandbox and wept. And my sisters and brothers crept in, weeping, and sat. And sat.

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is a Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland and Historian at the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She earned her degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Her book, China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church (Oxford, 2019) uses a Pentecostal church founded in Beijing in 1917 to understand the history of modern China. She is also the author of a memoir, Crossings: a bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar's ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood (not necessarily in that order) (Deseret Book and BYU Maxwell Institute, 2019).