Episode 200 (Transcript): Let's Zoom Waaay Out

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Quinn Nilsson, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack. All the notes and resources we cited are found at this link as well:

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CW: Hello, I'm Cynthia Winward

SH:  And I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's 200th episode is Let's Zoom Way Out. Welcome back, Susan.

SH: Hello, Cynthia. 

CW: It's great to be back. Season 9! 

SH: I was thinking about the 200th episode this morning and I was wondering how many notes do you think, how many pages of notes do you think that means we've written in the past five years?

CW: I can do the math right now. Seven pages per episode times two–

SH:Seven or eight. 

CW: –So 1,400, yeah. We have 1,400 pages of notes we've typed for this podcast. So 

we're doing our homework. 

SH: It kind of feels like that. 

CW: Yeah. I don't know if anybody's gotten anything out of the podcast, but we have. Yeah.

We, we have 1400 things, 1400 pages of things we've learned. So anyway I'm super excited to be back with you, especially about this topic of zooming out and people right now might be thinking, What? What are you? What do you, are we going into outer space? What how far are we zooming out? So why don't you give some, a little bit of an explanation of what we're going to be talking about today and this season.

SH: I can't guarantee that we don't need to go clear to outer space on some things. I don't know. We need some real perspective, but okay. Zooming out is actually setting up our theme for the whole season. And let's talk a little bit about. What that means and what we're thinking when we planned it.

So last season we zoomed in on women's individual spiritual lives and we decided that this season we want to zoom out because nothing exists without a context. So context is going to be a really big word this season. And context for the purposes of our discussions is everything that forms the setting for something. It's like everything in terms of which a thing can be fully understood.

CW: Yeah. 

SH: So I talked just a tiny bit about this in our last bonus episode that we just did, but when we can see and understand ourselves clearly, then we can start to get some idea of where we want to go next. 

CW:Yeah. 

SH: But you have to get a little distance on yourself to be able to do that. So context is a really important part of the process of spiritual formation. And as always, we're talking about things that are about women's lives as they relate to church on our podcast. And so I want to start by placing this idea, whatever the church does, it is never completely objective. And what I mean by that is that when the church acts or, says something, sets a policy, makes an announcement, whatever they're doing, it's in the context of  things like history who the current leaders are.

What their current goals and motivations are, what their concerns are. What's going on in the world? All these kinds of things. So the church is never coming from a vacuum. 

CW: I know I've said it several times on the podcast like, I always wonder, what would our church look like if it hadn't been founded here in the United States of America?

SH: Oh, right, right, exactly. That’s such a great example.

CW: I mean, for me, that's the biggest one right there. It's like, oh, we are such Americans. I can see it so clearly in our policy. Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you. 

SH: We’re not even just that. We're like Western Americans, you know? I mean, we're in Utah.

We come out of Salt Lake City. 

CW: Yeah, Jell O Belts, Intermountain West.

SH:  It shows we try to be global, but our Utahness shows sometimes it really does. And so, so that's one idea I want to put down. But then the other idea that I want to set down next to that one is that we don't experience anything the church does objectively either.

CW: That's where we want to go. 

SH: That's where we want to go. There is all kinds of complexity between those two points, where they are, where we are, and neither of us are coming at it objectively.