I'm a scripture scholar and writer who helps readers actually see what the biblical text says—especially about women. I teach online Institute, write the Times of Faith newsletter, and am the author of Line Upon Line, a Book of Mormon devotional series.
My Lab Was Also a Chapel - July 2026 Newsletter
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A quote everyone gets wrong led me to find my 370-year-old kindred spirit. My Lab Was Also a ChapelEarlier this month I was working on my manuscript before I sent it off to my editor. After months of writing, it was time to take out the hatchet and cut, cut, cut. When I taught an advanced writing course at BYU, I would often tell my students, “Don’t fall in love with your own words.” Deleting entire paragraphs you’ve written is not for the faint of heart. It made me think of a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain, “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” But guess what? There is no concrete evidence he ever said that. The actual quote is in a letter written on December 4, 1656, by Blaise Pascal.
"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."
"I have made this letter longer only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter."
Who is Blaise Pascal? I had never heard of him before. Turns out having French roots isn’t the only thing I have in common with him. He was a scientist who turned towards writing about religion, Christianity to be exact. As a former molecular biologist myself, I am fully aware of the arguments made that science and religion can’t live in harmony. I remember once as an undergrad attending BYU (my church’s private religious university), my religion teacher pointed towards the building where I took my molecular biology courses. With sadness in his voice, he proclaimed that those professors were “confused” and didn’t have “the full truth” because of what they taught on campus. His comment bothered me then and still does 35 years later. I felt like he was discounting the experience I had in my lab one late night. I was reading in my textbook about the tertiary and quaternary structures of DNA. Suddenly I had a distinct impression that none of what I was studying was designed by accident. God is in the details, even down to the molecular level. Pascal’s awakening occurred on November 23, 1654. He called it his Night of Fire. What happened that night in the basement of my life sciences building on campus was my own night of fire. Pascal’s writings, known as Pensées, had been written as unfinished fragments found among his papers after his death. Pascal claimed that we have three orders of reality: body, mind, and heart. Body is our physical realm, mind is our philosophic realm, and heart is our spiritual realm. He cautioned against thinking we can only consider one realm or the other. He said,
“Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only” (Pensées) We do ourselves a disservice when we tell ourselves these realms can’t overlap. I learn spiritual lessons when I study the structure of a cell. I increase my understanding of our physical world when I pray and meditate. As I take a hatchet to my study guide, cutting words that are unnecessary or repetitive, there is one thing I will never cut. I will never deny my own night of fire. For me, science and religion aren’t either/or it’s yes/and. Wishing you a great Sabbath, Heather Ruth Pack Continue the StudyAfter Pascal died at just 39 years old, a servant found a parchment sewn into the lining of his coat. It began with just one word: Feu (Fire). This is where he wrote about his night of fire, something he had never told anyone about. He had carried this parchment from coat to coat for eight years. Nobody knew it was there. His unfinished notes on faith and reason were gathered after his death and published as Pensées—French for thoughts. It was just a box of scraps he never got to arrange. One of the thoughts he wrote was, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” He spent his life on reason: geometry, physics, and inventing the first mechanical calculator. He was saying that reason stops at an edge. On the other side of that edge, something real begins. To learn more about his thoughts on science and religion, click here. Question to PonderWhat is something that both your heart and your mind know to be true? What I'm Working OnAbout Times of FaithTimes of Faith explores the historical world of scripture, the language behind the text, and the voices often overlooked in familiar biblical stories. Know someone who loves digging deeper into scripture?Feel free to forward this to them. Was this forwarded to you?Subscribe to receive the monthly newsletter
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I'm a scripture scholar and writer who helps readers actually see what the biblical text says—especially about women. I teach online Institute, write the Times of Faith newsletter, and am the author of Line Upon Line, a Book of Mormon devotional series.
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