Episode 255 (Transcript): What Do You Say? | 3 Conversations About Spiritual Seeking, Being Forgotten, and Chasing Equality
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Rachel Cousin for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
DA: I don’t grieve my child not being at church now. I wouldn’t wish her back at this point. Having a relationship with God, wonderful. Walking with Christ? Yes, please. Coming into an LDS church building and being subjected to what our trans and non-binary gender fluid, gender expansive members are being asked to do? No way.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinckley.
CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today’s episode is, “What Do You Say: Three Conversations about Spiritual Seeking, Being Forgotten, and Chasing Equality.”
CW: Mmmm.
SH: So, you know, as soon as we started doing our Journey episodes, Cynthia, soon after that I started to have a hunch that we could have an interesting conversation with pretty much any LDS woman.
CW: Agreed.
SH: I really couldn’t always predict who was gonna be the most interesting of those conversations and some of my favorites are people that I really didn’t know anything about. And that’s why I thought it might be a good idea to add the cards to this season and see how many more women we could get on here. And so we’re starting with three conversations today. We’ve been batch recording these. It’s been really fun. Well, it’s been really fun for me.
CW: It has been fun.
SH: I’m not sure it has been really fun for all the women. In fact, I think one of them might tell us this is not fun.
CW: Yeah. She says it so lovingly in a British accent, so that makes it even better. So, teaser.
SH: Yeah. But I’ve had a great time with it. But I was thinking this week, knowing that we were preparing for this episode to come out - releasing the first one of these, I heard Krista Tippet say something that was so interesting to me the other day, and she was talking about why in the beginning of On Being, she decided to start every conversation by asking the guest about their origins, like their religious origins or spiritual origins. And she said the reason that I settled on that question was because I’d had an experience with some Benedictines, with whom I was close, who came at really big spiritual questions using this line. And the line was, “Answer the question through the story of your life.”
CW: Wow.
SH: Answer the question through the story of your life.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And I thought that is what we’ve been doing on At Last She Said It. And that’s really what the point of these What Do You Say episodes are - to give women an opportunity to talk about some of the issues, some of the topics, some of the big ideas that we talk about on this podcast through the story of their lives.
Because we can all answer these questions just based on our experiences. We’re not asking anything hard. We’re not asking for anything that requires any kind of book learning or theological expertise or anything else. It’s just like you and I - we wanna come at these topics just through our personal experiences. And so I’m really excited to have the opportunity to hear more women answering big questions through the story of their very regular Latter-Day Saint woman lives.
CW: I actually think that’s one reason our podcast has been so successful is -
SH: Totally agree.
CW: - you and I are not theologians or historians. We have no expertise other than our stories and the women that have come on over the last six years telling their stories.
SH: Right.
