Margins, with Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming

About the Guests

Rev. Dr. Fatimah S. Salleh was born in Brooklyn to a Puerto-Rican and Malaysian mother and an African-American father. Dr. Salleh received her PhD in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master’s degree from Syracuse University in Public Communication, as well as a Master in Divinity from Duke University. She launched A Certain Work in 2018 in an effort to provide racial equity consultation and training for organizations and churches. In 2021, Salleh Ministries Inc, a religious non-profit, was established to focus on clergy wellness and wellbeing.

Margaret Olsen Hemming is a board member of the Center for Latter-day Saint Art and former editor in chief of Exponent II. She earned a Master's degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University. She lives in Chapel Hill with her spouse, three children, and a large vegetable garden.

Best Books

The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, volume 1 and volume 2, by Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming.

Reading the Bible from the Margins, by Miguel A. De La Torre.

Women's Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone.

Letters to My Daughter, by Maya Angelou.

THEME MUSIC: “Great Light,” by Deep Sea Diver.

Transcript

[Theme song: “Great Light,” by Deep Sea Diver]

FATIMAH SALLEH: I'll be honest with you, I hold the Quran as holy text. I hold the Bible as holy text. The Book of Mormon is in every sermon I preach. And my spiritual and religious journey has allowed me a depth and a breadth to honor the truth I have found along the way. It'd be hard for me to deny the truth in any of those works.

BLAIR HODGES: Religion can often seem like it’s a contest over who's right and who's wrong. But Fatimah Salleh experiences religion more like music, where artists sample from different genres to create something new. She was born Muslim, converted to Mormonism as a teenager, and she’s since been ordained a Baptist minister. She brings parts of her religious history with her all along the way.

Together with Latter-day Saint Margaret Olsen Hemming, she's writing a full commentary on the Book of Mormon as seen from the margins; through the eyes of women and people of color. Margaret and Fatimah are here to talk about that series, The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, today on Fireside with Blair Hodges.

First impressions of the Book of Mormon – 1:16

BLAIR HODGES: Fatimah Salleh, welcome to Fireside with Blair Hodges.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I'm happy to be here. Thank you, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: And Margaret Olsen Hemming also joins us. Margaret, thanks for being here.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Thanks so much for having us.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about a series of books that you're working on called The Book of Mormon for the Least of These. So this is scriptural commentary that's engaging with scripture from the Latter-day Saint tradition, from a social justice perspective.

I want to begin by talking, Fatimah, with you about how you first encountered the Book of Mormon. You say that you first felt the power of the Book of Mormon from the first time you started reading it at fifteen years old. So take us back there.

FATIMAH SALLEH: So my first introduction to the Book of Mormon is through missionaries. Elder Lloyd and Elder Gardner, I don't even know if they'll hear this, but they're such wonderful humans. And I started reading it as part of the investigative process. And I've just always felt very connected to it. I've really thought about the words in it, the stories is in it. And I've also been deeply troubled by it too, in many ways. So alongside with my deep love came a troubling. 

BLAIR HODGES: I wondered as a fifteen-year-old if the language was difficult, you know, it's written in this old-timey King James cadence. And some people come to the Book of Mormon and say, “Ah, this is kind of boring.” I think Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print,” or whatever, right? So some people find this book to be difficult to read, and sometimes even boring. As a fifteen-year-old, was that an obstacle for you?

FATIMAH SALLEH: It was a bit of an obstacle, but I grew up Muslim. So if you can see the translation, actually, in the Quran—and then also, my grandmother is just old school Christian, wonderful human, and was actually reading and doing Bible stories with me very young. And that was mostly from the King James.

So the language wasn't totally new, and the ways in which my grandmother reared me to kind of hear the stories, even in the language difference. There's sort of the phrasing of things.

BLAIR HODGES: That makes sense. So at the beginning of reading this book, you felt some spiritual power there, you felt really engaged with it. You also noticed things that you needed to wrestle with and things that cause discomfort.

How about you, Margaret, what was your experience growing up with the Book of Mormon?

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah, so I grew up in the church. And of course, like most Mormons, the Book of Mormon was sort of the center of our family scripture study, center of our religious identity.

I struggled pretty much my whole life with having any real connection to it. Even as a teenager, I felt much more interested in the Old Testament. I thought the women of the Old Testament were so compelling, there were lots of interesting stories about what they were doing. There are so few women in the Book of Mormon—very few named women in the Book of Mormon. And, you know, the Old Testament is violent, but I felt like there was more richness to the stories, whereas the Book of Mormon just felt so masculine to me, and just sort of a series of wars and battles that I just didn't feel much connection to.

And that lasted well into my adult life. Pretty much until I started talking with Fatimah about another way of reading the Book of Mormon that’s sort of situating it in a different context and reading it in this different framework.

BLAIR HODGES: How did that meeting come about?

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: So we met at an Allegheny Pilgrims retreat. And I knew of her work before that, and was a big fan of hers, and knew that she lived close to me. So after we met, I started inviting her to go out to lunches, hoping that she would agree to be my friend. [laughter]

And we would start talking at these lunches about the Book of Mormon, and she had been working on these ideas about the Book of Mormon for decades, she had taught a class at UNC, it was at the Institute building.

FATIMAH SALLEH: It was Latter-day Saint Institute.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah, at the University of North Carolina. And at every one of these conversations I just came home with—I felt like my mind brain almost exploding with excitement. It just felt like, “this is revolutionary, and everybody should be thinking about the Book of Mormon in these ways!” And it was so exciting to me, and I just wanted it to be out there. And so that's how it began.

BLAIR HODGES: As I'm reading the introduction, I'm seeing Fatimah's development as a scripture reader changing over time as well. So when you met her, she was beginning to become more equipped with these tools of reading that I kind of want to talk about.

I have one more question about what you said, Margaret. Did you notice, even as a little kid, when you were reading the Book of Mormon, that it just wasn't connecting? Like you were noticing there weren't [named] women and things like that. It wasn't just a given to you?

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yes. I was definitely born a feminist I guess [laughs]. It has always been part of my spiritual intuitive self. But there were other parts of the Book of Mormon that also didn't sit well with me.

Obviously, the racism of it always troubled me. But it also felt like the stories sort of slid past me, I guess, without catching me in the same way that the stories of the Bible did.

Exegesis and liberation theology – 6:36

BLAIR HODGES: And so Fatimah comes into the picture, you all are meeting together. Fatimah, talk a little bit about your background, because I want to explore this nerdy word “exegesis,” that scholars talk about when they look at scripture. So give us some insight into exegesis and your background.

FATIMAH SALLEH: When Margaret and I started meeting, I was still in Divinity School. And I went to divinity school because—I can look back at it now—because I needed to wrestle with God for three years about everything. I was really frustrated with the church prior to going into Div school. And I didn't know what to do with my testimony, and also what I considered to be almost like a deep disappointment with the church. And so what it is to have a testimony and be faithful, but also to be really troubled.

And so when I went to Divinity School, there's this process of exegesis where you really examine scripture. And let me just say this, every sermon I had to do an exegesis, I sucked! [laughter] I'm like, I cannot go on, it's so finite and detailed, and they had pages telling you how to do it. And you almost have to follow this formulaic way of them really introducing exegesis to you. Everything from analyzing one word in Hebrew or in Greek, or then going out from one single word moving out, almost like you're zooming in and zooming out, and going at what other scholars have said.

I remember telling my son, I'm like, “I don't do well with this exegesis.” And for me, it was a very tough process. I still think of it as a hard process, to be honest with you, just the rigor of it, and how much you have to sink into the text. And then knowing other scholars and what other work is out there. It's a really arduous task.

BLAIR HODGES: One thing that it really emphasizes is that there's no real single interpretation of a text. Everybody brings a particular perspective and a particular background to the text. And you really explore that throughout this commentary. You're bringing a particular lens that asks particular questions. Let's talk about that lens.

Your work is guided by a movement that's often called liberation theology. It's a way of thinking about God that really caught on in Latin America in the 60s and 70s and has carried on to the present. So Fatimah, give us a sense of how liberation theologians approach scripture; the kind of questions they ask.

FATIMAH SALLEH: So I remember taking a couple of classes on this. And liberation theology—everything from James Cone, which is like Black liberation theology, rooted in the African American experience, and what it means. And then there's womanist theology, which is Black women, and what it is to root a theology—and I mostly come from a Black womanist, I'm a bit of both Black Theology and womanist liberation theology, which actually says that from the lens of which you, look at scriptures, how it can liberate. It comes from the margins, it really does. And it's asking how God moves in the text towards those who are not seen, those who were oppressed, those who are not named, what may almost be hidden. And to look at the text as something that is meant to free you to know God more deeply and to know God's love more deeply, a God bound up in your liberation.

BLAIR HODGES: There's this part of the introduction here that says, "As we worked on this book, we specifically asked the questions, who is present but unheard, who is suffering? And why? What kind of violence is in the background of the story? How does this call us to relieve affliction? How are these actions informed by trauma? What are the diverse ways God is showing up in this person's life? What are the assumptions that this person is making? Is there another way to understand the story?"

So you also are humble in that you're not claiming that this is the definitive way of reading the text, but that it's one that's been really underutilized.

Margaret, maybe you can speak to that as you're being introduced to these ideas, meeting with Fatimah.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah, I think this may have been part of the reason that the Bible was sort of more exciting to me, particularly as a teenager and young adult is that there's this long history, right? Thousands of years of the Bible being interpreted and studied in lots of different ways. Many different perspectives, many different religious communities taking it and reading it from a lot of different lenses, and most of the time, not saying, “This is the definitive way of reading it,” but instead saying, “The strength of this text comes from this group being able to read it this way in this time, and this group being able to read it in this way, and this time.”

And the Book of Mormon is just a younger text, right? It has existed a shorter period of time. And so this kind of interpreting of the text has existed for a long time for the Bible. There's a long history of people doing this for the Bible. But nobody had done this as sort of a complete project, verse by verse reading, for the Book of Mormon. So that's what this project was sort of ambitiously attempting to do.

Interpreting from a particular social location – 11:44

BLAIR HODGES: It is ambitious—

FATIMAH SALLEH: I wanted to say this, because I think I needed to inject this, because I think it's important to know neither I nor Margaret make any bones about the fact of the lens we're coming from. So what I'm coming as is a woman of color, as a mother, as someone who goes through the world as a Black woman. And I want that to be known, that I'm going to actually read the text from this body, from this narrative, from this experience in 2022, or throughout my lifetime.

So that way, you know that I'm actually reading the text through that. It's important. Because I think for so long, white men—or people just automatically assumed white folks, when they were doing theology or doing exegesis, that they're the norm, that their lens is the norm. So they never got to name their social location by which they're interpreting the text, which is imperative, that we know sometimes who's reading it through which body and lens.

And I want to say that makes a difference in how you will read something, I would read this text differently in 2019 than I'm doing 2022! Take me after a pandemic and all of this mayhem, and I'm like, “Oh, crap, I’d probably read this text differently again!”

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

FATIMAH SALLEH: And so I just want to name that. I'm sorry, not to derail, but I think that's important to know, that we make no bones about who we are, and that we bring our whole selves to the reading and exegesis of the text.

BLAIR HODGES: That really resonates with me a lot. I mean, as a white guy, that's exactly how I experienced my reading of scripture, was that I was just reading what the text said. I didn't think about, as you said, my social location at all, probably until I was starting to look into graduate school and started to think about—Well, maybe even as an undergraduate in journalism, thinking about the different perspectives and what it means to be a journalist. And this idea that, “Oh, I'm not this objective person that's just coming to tell the facts. I come to my reporting from a particular perspective that's going to ask particular questions, that has particular assumptions, and particular prejudices.”

And so what I found was, it's easy to get defensive about that, and to sort of try to back away and say, “Well, what's wrong with my perspective? Are people saying there's something wrong with my perspective?” But rather to say, “Wow, my reading has been so impoverished because I haven't been thinking about these other possibilities. I haven't been putting myself in the shoes of other people. I haven't been trying to imagine and understand how other people might see this scripture or read the scripture, what it might mean to them.”

So rather than becoming defensive or upset or feeling like, “Well, hey, what's wrong with being a white guy?” Rather, “Well, hey, I've been missing out on so much stuff, because I've only been looking at it through this one particular lens.”

FATIMAH SALLEH: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: How about for you, Margaret? Does that resonate with you at all? I mean, you've talked a little bit about being a woman, right? So coming to the text as a woman, you face an even greater barrier, especially with the Book of Mormon, as we said, because there are a few women there.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So I think you probably had to confront that tension earlier than I did for that reason.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah, absolutely. And that is why Fatimah and I decided to include in the very beginning of the book, the first thing we included is a preface, which basically is an introduction to us, and where we were in the moment of writing these books. And we did an additional one in the second volume because we changed in three years.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Yes.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: And the pandemic happened. And we were in a really different place writing the second one than we were in the first one. And we felt like we needed to tell readers this is where we were in 2022. And it was really different a few years later, from where we were from the first volume.

I have read a whole bunch of commentaries about the Book of Mormon in the last few years for this project.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Yes, she has.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: And you almost never see that. And I wish we saw it more. I wish this was something that we talked about more of, you know, spiritual experiences are so personal. And those experiences are going to be filtered through your own social location. And we should just be honest about that.

There's nothing embarrassing about it, there's nothing wrong about it. But if we are only listening to a small portion of the population and their spiritual experiences, their way of interpreting scripture, it's having one dish at a feast. Right? It's very, very limiting.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, right.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: There have been, frankly, very few women who have published work about the Book of Mormon. There have been even fewer women of color—almost none—who have written about the Book of Mormon. And it is striking how much pushback we've gotten from men on this very subject. Because it's clear that as a community, people are still not comfortable with the idea of women writing about the Book of Mormon, writing about theology, and not limiting themselves to “women of the Book of Mormon,” or limiting themselves to, you know, topics that they see as “female” topics.

BLAIR HODGES: “Women’s topics,” yeah. Where does that pushback usually come from? Are you seeing that online?

FATIMAH SALLEH: Margaret gets it. Yeah, I'm gonna leave that one to Margaret because she filters all of it for me. [laughter] So I don't see any of it. And I'm sure she's not even telling me ninety percent of it. Because I'm like, what?! I get mad when she tells me just once. I think she has censored it for me. Which I am grateful for, Margaret. [laughter]

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah, I mean, I try to focus on the people who have been supportive and understand our vision and what we're trying to do. I don't think it's valuable to waste our time on people who are not interested in listening to what women have to say about the Book of Mormon. And I'm not going to name names, but I'll just say that some of the—

BLAIR HODGES: Name names! [laughter] Just kidding.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: I'll just say that some of the people in our community who you would hope would be ready to receive something like this are not ready, not ready to listen to what women have to say.

BLAIR HODGES: Would you say the majority of feedback you've gotten has been positive? You talk in the second volume about a lot of the positive feedback that you've gotten as well.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yes. And particularly from women and from people of color, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

I don't know, Fatimah, if you want to talk about going to the Black LDS conference in 2020. That was an extraordinary experience for me of people getting that first volume and telling me how much it meant to them to see Fatimah in person and hear her talk about the Book of Mormon. She keynoted that conference that year. And I watched, I was just sitting in the audience watching her in awe, as always—anyone who's seen Fatimah speak live, you know what a privilege it is. And people were just crying and talking about how extraordinary it was for them as people of faith, as members of the Church, to see a Black woman speak with authority about the Book of Mormon, and how, just, life-changing that is for them.

BLAIR HODGES: With all of that, have you got any constructive criticism? An example of something where someone said, “Hey, did you consider this” that has helped improve the project between volume one and volume two, or looking ahead?

FATIMAH SALLEH: I think we have had constructive. I think there have been several people we've had read it and then they've come back and told us how we can maybe do this and do that. And so it's been great.

Margaret has been very careful to choose the people we actually send it to, to look at it. And we do send it to family members and beloveds, and then also other people who are in the work and doing this kind of work. And we've gotten quite a number of things that I feel that have been really constructive and beautiful. And we take it and run with it. It's just really beautiful. Because I don't think you read Scripture solely. We're not reading it by ourselves. And scripture is communal.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's the tension that we see. Well, I don't even know if I want to call it tension unless I would say it's very productive, as we’ve talked about how individual scripture reading can be, but it also happens in the context of community. So there's a sense in which individual voices are necessary and foundational, but it also happens that we're reading with others.

And so I see that even in the process of this book's creation with you Margaret, and you Fatimah, coming together, and it's this little community that's creating this and I think it strengthens the commentary. You know, there are a lot of commentaries that are written by single authors and some that are written by groups. Having a partnership like this, I think, really makes for a strong voice and a good mix of perspectives. I think that comes through in the books.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Thank you. Margaret brings all her beauty and what she knows and what she’s studied, and then I can bring in what I study. And then we also have people in our love circle that we discuss it with, you know, and that also helped with how we are narrating it.

So, I would dare say that this has been a communal project. And I love the fact that scripture can be read as individuals and change us. And it could also move communally and change us as community too. So that's the beauty of text.

A text about refugees – 21:31

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's the power of scripture. I think the fact that we can come to scripture again and again, and find new things there is why scripture “lives.” That's how scripture maintains, that's why it's scripture.

And one thing that we see here that I think is unusual for a Book of Mormon scripture commentary is you all aren't afraid to argue with the text a little bit, you're not afraid to dig in and disagree with the text or offer different perspectives on the text. Whereas a lot of approaches are much more laudatory. You know, they treat the Book of Mormon as if every word is correct, every word is right. Or they'll either skip over problematic things or try to excuse it. And you are not afraid to disagree with some things and kind of resist some things.

As we go, we'll talk about some of those examples and get specific about it. But let's begin with a theme you find in the Book of Mormon, and that really resonates with a liberation perspective. I'm thinking about refugees. So you remind readers, the Book of Mormon starts out as a story of refugees.

Fatimah, what are you seeing in the text to interpret it that way? And what do you think that word does for readers?

FATIMAH SALLEH: I think what the word does may have changed within the last five to six years, right? And what was happening at the border of this country. But it was important to me and became all the more important to focus on a sort of immigration refugee narrative that really is the crux of this book, like people always emigrate, like leaving land and trying to find new, and then what they do when they get there, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I think it's really important for me, not only the refugee story, but sometimes the audaciousness! [laughs] Like when the Nephites meet the Mulekites, and then all of a sudden, now they're in power and governing, like, you know, I almost want the Mulekites to be given their own books. I'm like, can we get their book? I want to know what this looked like, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!

FATIMAH SALLEH: So there's certain things that I just really loved. And I wanted us—let me be very honest too, is that I had a wonderful teacher, Reverend Dr. Turner, who said, when you preach from social crisis—it was called preaching into social crisis—you preach with the newspaper in one hand and the scriptures in the other.

And I know I've said this before, but it's important to realize that what was happening at the backdrop of this nation and of the world really impacted how we were reading the text. And to notice immigrants to notice refugees seems so important, especially for this country and what we were doing in that process, and how we were treating them.

So I would have to say it was part of me watching the news, or hearing the news, and also reading the text. It's interesting to me that what can be happening in the world can highlight what is happening in the text, things I may never have seen until I lived in this season.

BLAIR HODGES: And with these refugees, so we have this family that's in Jerusalem, they're exiled basically, they have to leave to save their lives, they cross the ocean, they come to this new land, there they have family divisions, there's all these problems. And you also use that experience to contextualize some of what you find to be problematic in the text.

I'm thinking, for example of Nephi, who's the first record keeper in the text, talking negatively about other people and introducing some racist themes, and you put it in the context of trauma, of lived trauma that he's experienced. So when you're identifying racism on the part of Nephi, you're calling it out, but you're also extending some grace to him as a writer and offering readers a reason to still engage with Nephi. And to suggest, “well, this is kind of what's informing this.

FATIMAH SALLEH: If we were to discredit every prophet for their hang-ups, we would have no prophets. I just think that if we would discredit any of us from doing our calls because of our brokenness or how we're handling certain things, none of us would be worthy to live out what we were meant to do.

And so I don't—I take prophets and I take folk, and Margaret can speak to this too, but I take them as fully human. I allow them a humanity. By stripping them of the frailties of the human experience, by allowing us to—allowing practice to almost sit above the human experience does not allow you to know that God can still work in broken hard places and people.

And so for me, it's deeply powerful to name the mess, to name the mess-ups, fess up, and then clean it up in ways which we acknowledge this, but it does not make—you're human, Nephi. You're human. If you're beat the crap out of over and over again within an inch of your life, for just trying to do what God has told you, you don't think you have a residue of like bitterness or resentment to your own blood trying to kill you? And so I think by not allowing humanity to be in our religious leaders in in the text, we strip them of an understanding that we desperately need.

Racism in the Book of Mormon – 26:46

BLAIR HODGES: It's really wise because you find ways that the Book of Mormon itself undercuts some of the negative things you find. Like the Book of Mormon itself makes observations and things that help contextualize what you see as problematic.

So I'm thinking of the racism, for example, Later on, Nephi—who basically says “God cursed these people, gave them dark skin, and they were lazy and wicked and all this stuff,” later says, “All are like unto God: Black, white, bond, free.” Which you point out is a way of painting a whole spectrum of things. It's like when God created the day and the night, he also created everything in between . So you show this Universalist impulse that Nephi himself includes in the record that undercuts some of the other things he says about race.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Right, and there's other evidence to counter some of his claims, like the idea that the Lamanites are lazy, when actually they build this whole society that repeatedly rivals the Nephite society, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: The repeated claims throughout the book that Nephites make, that they're lazy, or that they don't work hard. Well, where did this great society come from that, you know, repeatedly is able to almost, and then finally does overwhelm the Nephite society? Where does that come from?

BLAIR HODGES: And I don't know why Latter-day Saint readers haven't already been clueing into this for a long time, because the Book of Mormon is unique in maybe all of world scripture, in having the writers explicitly say, “We're not perfect. And there's mistakes in here.”

I mean, they're explicit in saying—one of my favorite passages in the entire book is where it says, “Condemn me not for my imperfections, but thank God, give thanks to God, that you can see my imperfections and try to be wiser than we've been. “

The Book of Mormon itself invites us to read it in this critical way and grapple with it. And Latter-day Saint readers have resisted that. We just really haven't done it. We haven't done that work. Your book is one of the few that I've seen that really takes those disclaimers seriously.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yes. I think there's been some work about, you know, realizing that Nephi is an unreliable narrator, as are all of the humans in the Book of Mormon, and that we need to sort of realize that they are on their own journey with God. But what we've tried to add into the book is offering some charity and some grace along with that realization, and understanding, that even as you sort of call them out on their failings, on their own mistakes, even their own factual errors, that there is value in seeing the way they were trying to understand their relationship with God, and the way they were struggling with the burdens that they carried, and where they saw God in their lives, and where they didn't see God in their lives, and how they were asking these hard questions, as they were, you know, facing these really difficult things.

And so even as you see them as imperfect prophets, we can become better people by still seeing that imperfection and offering them some grace at the same time.

Strong like unto the men – 30:22

BLAIR HODGES: And again, it's just striking to me that the Book of Mormon itself tells us that. [laughs] If we would just take that seriously. You know, they say, “this is not perfect. Don't condemn me for that, please show some charity, but also try to do better,” right?

And there's a passage here, this part of the first volume that you wrote, I mean, I just had to laugh when I read this because it was so perfect. There's a verse where Nephi is describing all the tribulations they went through in the wilderness, they had to eat, you know, raw meat, and they didn't have shelter and all these kinds of things. And then he says that God blessed the women to be “strong like unto the men.” And you spend a couple, you know, I think two pages on this. Who wants to unpack that? Because this is so—this is just such a perfect moment here.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Margaret, you do that, because I'm just shaking my head. I'm still upset at that verse.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: No, no, this is all you. [laughing all around]

FATIMAH SALLEH: I'm still ticked.

BLAIR HODGES: I love the commentary.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yeah, go for it. I know you have things to say.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I just am like, oh really? That's mighty—

This is why I wanted Margaret to do this because I go off on this. I'm just like, they having babies, they nursing, trucking around these babies. And you're like, “Oh, and they were made strong like men.”

I'm like, “Are you—what?” Side eye. And that's why I'm like, ain't nobody going to talk about how this man done talked about these women going through all of this mess but then like, “Oh, and because they were strong and had these babies and did all these things, but then they were made strong like—”

I just felt like that language was so deeply—I'm like, I don't know, y'all! Like I said, I have very few words for that because I got so ticked. It was mostly Margaret who wrote it up because I was just livid!

BLAIR HODGES: It feels like Nephi is maybe trying to be complimentary there by saying, hey, there were—. But you know, here's the passage here. It just says, "If the women were doing the work of men and the work of women, they're actually stronger. These women are traveling through the wilderness just as the men are, but they're doing it while also doing the labor that comes with being female there. They've been giving life, nursing babies, carrying children on their backs. They're stronger. Nephi misses this because of his cultural background. But modern readers can do better and recognize the work of women."

And again, you don't hesitate to point out here that if there were women's voices in the text, we might have a little bit different of a story here.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Oh, my gosh, a little different? Friend! It would be more than a little different.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] That’s fair, that’s fair. I'm hedging big time, there. I’m like, “Well, it would be a teensy bit different.” Yeah. [laughter]

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: So Fatimah and I have spoken at different times about which narrative would be the most valuable to read from women's perspective in the Book of Mormon, because there are so many candidates, and we really don't have any. And we both agree that the women in the wilderness from this very, you know, the origin story in First Nephi, would be one of the most valuable.

Because you have this moment of Nephi talking about the women being as strong as men, which is just eye rolling in the extreme. And then really close to it, you have another moment where Laman and Lemuel are claiming that the women are miserable and suffering and that this is terrible for them. And then Nephi talking about how like, “No, they're doing great, like the women are so happy, and they're blessed, and this is really, like they're doing really well!”

And what we don't ever have in any of that is the women saying how they're doing. [laughs] And maybe they're all feeling differently about it, you know, maybe it's like Laman and Lemuel and Sam and Nephi, where they all have these different perspectives. But we don't know, because what we only have is their experiences filtered through these men who are arguing about how the women are doing.

And so part of the goal of this project was to just pause at those moments and say, who is silent in this text, and who doesn't get a voice? And remind people that that doesn't mean we are forced to just ignore them, or act like they're not there.

Often when I'm talking to people about this project they say, “Well, there aren't any women in the Book of Mormon.” And I have to remind them, there aren't very many named women, but the women are there, and we forget because the text doesn't name them, and because when we're talking in Gospel doctrine, or in the church manuals or whatever, we just pass right over them. We don't sit and talk about them. But they are present. And we make a choice to skip over them. And we don't have to.

FATIMAH SALLEH: You know, one of the things that is the point of exegetical work,—this is something my beautiful professors taught—was about imagination. So have the conversation. So maybe Laman and Lemuel's wives are miserable, their husbands are miserable, they're probably making them miserable. Maybe Nephi's hearing a different side of things, as his wife is talking to him differently about, “I support you, I'm with you in this blah, blah.”

So I just want to say if we even allowed ourselves to do imagination work in gospel doctrine, like what were the conversations they had, why do you suppose they had different views? Why do you suppose we're not hearing from them? And to ask the questions and actually do that work—That's also a part of engaging scripture, is to work around the imagination of what this would look like.

BLAIR HODGES: What would you say to people who say, “Well, you're just bringing these trendy new views to the text.” Or you know, Latter-day Saints will often use this phrase, “the philosophies of men mingled with scripture,” you know, which is also interesting in how gendered it is, this idea that the philosophies of men would be mingled with scripture, but it's a sense of you're twisting the scriptures by pointing out these kinds of things. How do you all respond to that?

FATIMAH SALLEH: I don't. Margaret?

[laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: You just don't have time for it. You're just like, alright.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I'm like, Okay, that's great. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I'm gonna go ahead and keep doing what I'm doing. Margaret, how do you think if you were to respond?

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: I think if we don't keep doing work like this, scripture becomes irrelevant. And it's actually going down a really dangerous path, where scripture is only meaningful for a very small portion of the population. And you start making scripture, and even religion, speak to a very few number of people.

I think you're seeing trends in you know—there are a lot of polls going out about what's happening with younger generations, and talking to them about what role they see religion playing in their lives, and why. And younger people are talking about how they just don't see religion as relevant. And I think part of the reason is that we're saying—or at least some people are saying, “Well, scripture has nothing to do with issues of immigration, scripture has nothing to do with poverty, and the plight of refugees at the border, and women who are oppressed, and racism” and you know, “stop talking about those issues, because they have nothing to do with scripture and God doesn't care about them.”

And again, you're denying people a feast that God has prepared for us, you're denying people a richness to the text that is there, and you're saying that it's not. And I think that is dangerous. And honestly, I think you're refusing blessings to people.

BLAIR HODGES: I like that you're talking about the gifts we miss out on, you're talking about the possibilities that we foreclose when we do that.

I would also say on a practical level, I personally believe that it's not possible to avoid mingling our philosophies with scripture. I think that's what reading scripture is, fundamentally. And I don't think that phrase is saying, “Don’t mingle philosophies with scripture.” I think it's saying, that's just how it is, that you're going to be doing that, it's not possible not to.

So there are two things there, as you said, we miss out and we disempower scripture when we refuse to ask these kinds of questions. But we are also in denial that we're already been mingling stuff from the very beginning. Nobody can avoid that mingling.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I think that's a beautiful way to think about it. I don't think necessarily that God asks us to approach texts without bringing our full human selves to it. That'd be an interesting requirement to have, that God—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, interesting and impossible!

FATIMAH SALLEH: Exactly! I'm like, “oh, by the way, I need you to be absent of complete humanity, of your humaneness, when you read this.” I'm like, “I need you to be objective when you read a text about violence, about rape, about oppression, about what it looks like to be a refugee, what it looks like to flee for your life, what it looks like to do the call amidst complete unacceptance of that, what it looks like to be the exilic people, what does it look like to fight for things and still lose?” Like, and then God would say, “but I need you to be completely objective when you read it.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I don't know. I don't feel like that. God is actually asking us to move in text. So then we could understand and move deeper in our humanity and see each other better and see how God moves in us and through us.

Religious cross-pollination – 40:14

BLAIR HODGES: That's Fatimah Salleh. And she was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Puerto Rican and Malaysian mother and an African American father. And she now is a mother of four herself. Received a PhD in mass communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also a master of divinity from Duke University, and together with Margaret Olson Hemming she's the creator of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These.

So one of the themes we see over and over again, as you mentioned earlier, Fatimah, is people are on the move in the Book of Mormon. We see them leave Jerusalem to this new place, than we see people moving to new place, and new place, a lot of these new Exodus movements, and you've experienced that in your own personal spiritual and religious life as well. Coming from a Muslim background, joining the Latter-day Saint tradition, and now have become ordained as a reverend in a different tradition, which makes this book all the more remarkable to me, that you would still spend time with the Book of Mormon as a religious text when it's primarily really only used by Latter-day Saint communities, and you have just joined a different community.

I'm curious about your relationship to the Book of Mormon now. Do you still view it as scripture that's powerful in your life? And how do you negotiate that in your new tradition? I imagine it would be difficult to introduce other people who aren't Latter-day Saints to the Book of Mormon. So talk a little bit about your relationship to the book now.

FATIMAH SALLEH: I still hold it as holy text. And I'll be honest with you, I hold the Quran as holy text. I hold the Bible as holy text. I think my journey, my spiritual and religious journey, has allowed me a depth and a breadth to honor the truth I have found along the way. And I wouldn't deny that. It'd be hard for me to deny the truth in any of those works as the holy texts.

And so, yeah, in my Christian faith, now, I had to ask the pastor I'm working with, I’m like, you know, “I'm writing a commentary on the Book of Mormon, and I am holding it as holy text. And I want to know what you think about that, and I'm gonna do it. So what do you think?” And he's like, “Umm. Okay, we realized when you came along that you had this part of you, this distinct background, and I think we're going to be okay with the fact that—”

And he said something to be really beautiful months later, he's like, “We're not afraid of your courage. You're doing what God has asked of you. I may not understand it all the time. But there's no doubt that God is with you and moving with you. So you do what God has called you to do.”

BLAIR HODGES: Are there things from the Book of Mormon that you wish you could carry in that new place? You know, for example, you talk about the great stuff it says about Eve, when there's a sermon about Eve, you know, and it's mixed, there's some things in there that you wrestle with, there's some things in there that you love, but that's fairly unique to the Latter-day Saint canon, so are there things like that, that you wish you could bring into it?

FATIMAH SALLEH: All the time, and who is to say I don't? [laughs] I really have to say I may not be overtly bringing it in, but it's very hard for me now to preach were it not for all the ways in which I have loved texts, and they have literally bled into my life, that I don't think you can inextricably tear them apart. I think that the Book of Mormon is in every sermon I preach. The passages of the Quran are there, the Bible is there. And it's not necessarily intentional, it's just who I am, and how I'm moving with the God of my now. And so they're there.

BLAIR HODGES: Margaret, how about you? Are there things that Fatimah has brought to you that you wish were more a part—you're still in the Latter-day Saint tradition yourself, so are there things you have learned from Fatimah and things that you've done in this project where you wish you could integrate more fully into a broader Latter-day Saint experience?

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that's part of the mission of this book. And we hope people feel comfortable using it in their classes and their family study, and integrating it into how they understand the Book of Mormon.

I use it all the time in my church experience. I also advocate in my classes for ways of reading the Book of Mormon that Fatimah has introduced to me from her personal background, and then also from her experiences at Divinity School.

So for instance, slow reading. I think in the LDS church, we often advocate for reading the Book of Mormon quickly, right? We have these challenges of like, read the Book of Mormon so many times within a year, or let's try to read it within like the last two months of the year or whatever, let's stay up all night.

BLAIR HODGES: We've got our reading charts that we fill out.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Right, let's stay up all night and read it together overnight, and whatever. And instead, this project has done the opposite, and we've done this really slow reading. And we've gotten from First Nephi to the end of Alma over—it's been, you know, five and a half years. And just going really, really carefully, verse by verse.

And I've gotten so much more out of it than I ever have going quickly and trying to get through it, you know, without kind of settling into it. So I often tell people at church now, like, “Do a slow reading, try to—you know, there's no pressure to get through it quickly.”

So I think both on a topical sort of conceptual level of ideas, but then also sort of the nuts and bolts of it. It has completely affected my scriptural reading, and also how I talk about scripture in church.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Margaret Olson Hemming, an independent scholar, author and editor. She's the former editor of a publication called Exponent II, and the current art director of Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, which is a co-sponsor of Fireside with Blair Hodges, I should say as well. [laughs] She's also on the advisory board for the Center for Latter-day Saint arts and has a master's degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University.

We didn't have a lot of time in this interview to get into the second volume, we spent a lot of time with the first volume. They're both excellent. You originally had planned a three-volume stretch, the second volume is longer than the first, are you still aiming for a three-volume set?

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Yes, we are working on the third volume. We are going to start as soon as kids go back into school here with the fall. But yes, the third volume will be Helaman to the end. So this will be the last one.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, cool. That's gonna be a big task. There's a lot of ground to cover and you have been doing such wonderful work with what you've done so far.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Thank you.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Thank you.

The spiritual and emotional labor of interpretation – 46:56

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk a little bit about the difficulty of it to kind of wrap up here. And Fatimah, you speak to this in the beginning of volume two where you say there was a time when you weren't sure this was going to finish, when you weren't sure this was going to happen. Because of cultural events like COVID-19, the murders of George Floyd and other people in 2020, and the uprising of Black Lives Matter, and all of the stress that surrounds that, especially for people of color and a woman of color like yourself. And Margaret, you say, really wrapped her arms around you and really wanted you to stick it out.

But you also mentioned that liberation readings themselves can just be really taxing and difficult. So not just everything that was happening around you, but also the labor, the emotional and spiritual labor that it takes to do a social justice reading of this text. So I wanted to hear a little bit more from you about that. Because you say the book almost didn't happen.

FATIMAH SALLEH: You're very right, it didn't. And Margaret was just so pivotal. My husband said it best. He's like, “You wouldn't've done this if it wasn't for Margaret.” I'm like, “That's for sure!”

I think and where Margaret literally, I would have to say, loved and urged, love-urged me to continue. And then she took on a lot of responsibility that I just didn't have the emotional wherewithal for. I felt like the world was crumbling around racial social justice issues, I felt like there was so much injustice that I didn't want to read the text and talk about social justice when I felt like it was so absent in the air I was breathing.

I think I was mourning, I'm still in grief, but it was a deep grief at what was happening in our country politically, socially, every way. And I think I had a hard time even talking to God at that time. I didn't even want to pray much. I just wanted to just be mad and away, like, why am I even doing this? Why ­are Black folks—we have been praying for so long that things change. I feel like it's just so bad. And I think every so often you just get a little bit upset. And I think that translated in me not wanting to do this work anymore. I'm like, for what? For what, Margaret?

And I think having conversations with her and my family helped. But I don't think—I wrote that because I don't want folks to think that it doesn't come as a cost to do this work. It comes at a cost. Especially when you're experiencing what can only be like a reliving of a bad nightmare in this country. And you're fighting with family about it. And you're fighting with neighbors and people. And so I would have to say, I had a hard time seeing God in the last couple of years as well as I would have liked. And this book was just one more thing I just couldn't feel like I could do.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you feel like you've seen God more since? Has that returned to you? Or are you still kind of in that wilderness of searching and wrestling and grappling?

FATIMAH SALLEH: It ebbs and flows. It ebbs and flows.

Sometimes I can see God so prevalent, then other times I'm no better than the Psalter who writes, “where are you God?” And so I move in and out of that. But I think that'll be my experience in this body, and that I have in raising Black, brown children in this time. I've got to allow myself times where I wrestle with God and wonder if God is present.

BLAIR HODGES: I want to say, too, I do get the sense that you would say to some people that if they needed to, if you had to step away from this project, that you would have honored that and Margaret would have honored that. And I'm really thankful that you're both putting in that work. And I recognize the difficulty of that.

But I'm also grateful that your book makes it clear that you would extend that grace, that some people can't do that labor, and for whatever reason need to put that burden down and, and your book leaves space for all of those kinds of reactions. The way you read the Book of Mormon shows that the Book of Mormon itself has room for all of those reactions.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Yeah, I think you can't read about Alma and Amulek without realizing that Amulek took a break after so much turmoil and everything that happened. You can't read Alma without seeing—like, if you watch, you'll see the very prophets we hold dear had moments, and that's all of them. Remember Nephi—and that's the third volume—was like, what's going on what's even the purpose? Or Elijah? Well, he's like, just let it be over, I'm done. I'm done with this whole thing. And so I think to read Scripture and not know that grief and being heartbroken is not a part—

What did Joseph Smith say? To know God is to have God get into your heart and like wrench it, you know, wrenching your chest. I'm sure I'm slaughtering the quote. But I feel like I give space for all of it because I read the text, and it is all part of our journey to know and to live beautifully and to love a God that sometimes feels really complex and hard to see.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Thank you for that. All right let's take a quick break and come back for best books. I'm excited to hear what you have to recommend we'll be right back on Fireside with Blair Hodges.

[BREAK]

Best Books – 54:37

BLAIR HODGES: It's Fireside with Blair Hodges and today we're talking with Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olson Hemming about their book series The Book of Mormon for the Least of These. And now it's time for best books. So this is the opportunity guests have to recommend a book, it could be something they just recently read, it could be something that they read when they were a kid that has really stuck with them. It could be a book that relates to their project, or something that doesn't relate at all, this is just an opportunity for our guests to share one of the best books that they recommend people read.

So let's start with you, Margaret, what did you bring for us to recommend.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: So this is a book that definitely relates to our project. We read it, I reference it in our books, and I went back to it many times while I was writing. It's called Reading the Bible from the Margins by Miguel A. De La Torre. And I was very impressed by his way of positioning the Bible as a liberative text. And I found it inspirational many times as we were working.

I think anyone who has concerns about taking sort of an old text and using it to understand problems of today should take a look at this book. Particularly his introduction, because it gives such an important thesis about how vital it is to read holy text in this way.

I'll just I'll just read this one sentence from him which I underlined and I actually put up on my wall in my office, and I look at it every day while I've been working on this project.

"Reading the Bible from the margins is as crucial for the salvation of the dominant culture as it is for the liberation of the disenfranchised." And that just reminds me in all the privilege that I have, that this work is for all the world. And it's vital for all of us to read scripture in this way.

BLAIR HODGES: Wonderful. Fatimah, what did you bring for us?

FATIMAH SALLEH: The Women's Bible Commentary. It's a huge thing, but it's more like a resource and it goes through every single woman in the Bible and gives you what woman scholars have said, biblical scholars. Beautiful.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone is fabulous if you want to get yourself an introduction to understand Black liberation theology.

And my third is Letters to My Daughter by Maya Angelou. It's absolutely gorgeous and how she does these vignettes and how she's walking through her life, and learning the lessons as she narrates her life.

BLAIR HODGES: Wonderful. Thanks for those recommendations. And I again recommend to people, especially those who are interested in the Book of Mormon, your series The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, it's published by By Common Consent Press, BCC press, so shout out to them as well. Margaret and Fatimah, thanks so much for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun.

MARGARET OLSEN HEMMING: Thanks so much for having us, Blair.

FATIMAH SALLEH: Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been so much fun.

Outro – 57:30

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.

Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.

Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.