I've had this book on my shelf for about 5 years and never read it. (There are so many books to read!) But I am giving a talk in church in a week about President Nelson's talk from the women's session in General Conference about women and the priesthood, and I thought it was high time I finally read this book. I thought it was very enlightening and interesting--I was underlining sentences throughout the book. I was a little disappointed at how Dew got right up to the questions that I feel like everyone is asking--like, isn't there an inherent inequality in men having this authority while women don't?--and then just swept them away by saying "No, it doesn't," without giving any sort of explanation or justification to her thoughts. I am totally ready to agree with her, but she didn't explain it. She just went into talking about how we have to have faith and not understand everything, which I agree with, but there HAS to be some sort of explanation that someone could make that helps people feel better about it. Right?
She does make some great points. I loved how several times she detailed all of the opportunities for leadership and governance that women have in our church that they don't have in other churches. This is something we might be just taking for granted because we are so used to all of the chances we have to lead organizations, speak from the pulpit, and teach gospel doctrine. It made me feel very empowered to realize how unique we are in this way. I felt like the crux of her argument was in the chapter "Access to God's Greatest Blessings," where she goes into the differences between priesthood authority and priesthood power and the blessings of the priesthood. It was very similar to what President Nelson said in Conference, which felt so radical and exciting, but obviously is not new at all, since Dew wrote this book years ago. I won't detail everything she said here, but it will be very helpful to my talk and I plan to use it there.
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