As Latter-day Saints, we don’t have to choose between faith and intellect.

For the month of March, the LDS Living Book Club will be reading and studying Every Needful Thing, a collection of essays from accomplished academics and professionals who speak about discipleship not only with their minds but also from their hearts.

Every Needful Thing marks a milestone in the Latter-day Saint gospel scholarship with all 25 contributors being women. Melissa Inouye and the late Kate Holbrook, who passed from cancer this last year, worked to compile essays from accomplished academics and professionals that urge us to seek “anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report” and learn to live in a world of complexity and abundance.

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With humility and openness that makes their specialized work accessible to a general reader, these authors model how to live life as a whole person. They relate the twists and turns of their intellectual and spiritual journeys, giving readers confidence to make their own ways and to pursue “every needful thing” (D&C 88:119).

• An easy-to-follow reading schedule shared on Instagram
• Excerpts from the book shared on LDSLiving.com
• Poignant quotes and discussion of the topics addressed in the book

Each month we choose a new book to read together. Joining is easy! Simply follow @ldslivingbookclub on Instagram for reading reminders and insights.

Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and Heart

A collection of essays from accomplished academics and professionals who speak about discipleship not only with their minds but also from their hearts. Instead of pushing us to choose between faith and reason, love and law, truth within the restored gospel and truth in the wider world of God's children, these writers urge us to seek "anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report" and learn to live in a world of complexity and abundance.

Available in Deseret Book stores and at deseretbook.com.

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Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is a senior lecturer in Asian studies at the University of Auckland. She received her PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. A member of the advisory board of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, Dr. Inouye is committed to the mutually reinforcing relationship between faith and learning. She and her husband, Joseph, have four noisy and joyful children, botanically nicknamed Bean, Sprout, Leaf, and Shoot.

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Kate Holbrook

Kate Holbrook has a BA from Brigham Young University, and MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD from Boston University. At the time of her death (2022), Kate was the Academic Outreach Director at the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she focused on women's history. Kate's books include The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women's History, Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, and At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discoursed by Latter-day Saint Women.

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