Episode 259: What Do You Say? | 3 Conversations About Mysticism, Music, and Living in the Now
In Episode 259, Susan and Cynthia ask Mer, Zinah, and Carol, What Do You Say? It's the second installment of ALSSI's wide-ranging conversations with wise Latter-day Saint women. Each guest answers randomly selected questions about their memories, insights, and beliefs through stories of their personal lives and experiences.
Notes & Quotes:
To hear more from Mer Monson, check out ALSSI Ep. 157
Motherhood is a Choice: Not Inevitable or an Obligation, by Fatimah Mohammed
Original Goodness: Made in the Divine Image, Center for Action and Contemplation, 10/27/2021
What Do We Do With Sin?: Collective Sin and Evil, Center for Action and Contemplation, 3/13/2026
Motto, by Bertolt Brecht
Into the Gray, Substack, Rev. Benjamin R. Cremer
“We were raised to see motherhood not just as an inevitability that would come at the right time—when we were married to an acceptable man—but also as a duty. A price we paid for being women. The thing we owed the world. [...] We were born girls, so they told us our very existence revolved around what our bodies could offer the world. To think otherwise wasn’t an option. Who are you to be born with a womb only to choose not to use it? Who do you think you are? How dare you? The very idea of it was inconceivable.” —Fatima Mohammed
“My deepest me is god.” —Catherine of Genoa
“In fact, evil is often culturally agreed-upon, admired, and deemed necessary, as is normally the case when a country goes to war, spends most of its budget on armaments, admires luxuries over necessities, entertains itself to death, or pollutes its own common water and air. Evil seems to be corporate, admired, and deemed necessary before it becomes personal and shameable.
Sin and evil must be more than personal or private matters. Convicting people of individual faults does not change the world. I believe the apostle Paul taught that both sin and salvation are, first of all, corporate realities. Yet, we largely missed that essential point, and thus found ourselves in the tight grip of monstrous evils in Christian nations, all the way down to the modern era.” —Richard Rohr
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertholt Brecht