This episode of the podcast is very close to my heart. I’m speaking with Dr. Miranda Wilcox, my friend and colleague, about a new book just out from the Maxwell Institute, written by the late Kate Holbrook and titled Both Things Are True. Miranda and I had the privilege of shepherding the book to completion after Kate died of cancer in 2022. Miranda, who is a professor of English at BYU, co-edits the Maxwell Institute’s book series we call “Living Faith,” a series now up to seventeen titles featuring scholars who write in a personal, conversational way from their professional expertise to strengthen faith. In that capacity, Dr. Wilcox served as lead editor for Both Things Are True, the latest book in the series.

Kate Holbrook, who at the time of her death was the managing historian of women’s history at the Church History Department and a longtime friend and advisor to the Institute, spent her professional life discovering and amplifying the voices of other women, and mentoring other people in how to do the same. So Miranda and I wanted to find a very special lens to approach this very special book.

We settled on a luminous essay by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, a writer whom Kate revered and whose rigorous spirituality inspired Kate’s own scholarly methods. We felt that Weil’s essay resonates in profound ways with Kate’s aims in Both Things Are True, and we hope that the essay will be a kind of gift to you from Kate. We also hope, of course, that this interview will inspire you to buy the book and fully absorb the wisdom and compassion of Kate Holbrook. She wanted nothing more than to share what she had found.