Our Story: A family at the margin
Faith in the Footnotes began the way most good things do — with a Sunday afternoon, a stack of books, and a question no one had quite written down.
For years our family has watched General Conference with a notebook on the armrest. Whenever a speaker quoted a poem, a hymn, a novel — anything that sent a small shiver up the back of the neck — we'd jot it down. C.S. Lewis. Victor Hugo. Tolkien. Browning. Wordsworth.
Over time the notebook filled, and then filled again. We began to notice patterns: that certain apostles return to certain authors the way old friends return to a favorite café. That a single Tolkien line had been quoted from the pulpit in three different decades. That the stories we read in our living rooms had already, quietly, been read in the conference center.
This site is the notebook, finally typed up. It is a small archive. A study. An invitation to read the footnotes — and through them, to read the heart of the gospel a little more fully.
"To preserve, with reverence and joy, the literature woven through the words of prophets — and to invite a generation back to the books that shaped them."
A second testimony
The scriptures are first. They will always be first. But great literature, at its best, is a kind of second testimony — a way that truth, having been spoken once in scripture, finds another voice.
When an apostle quotes Lewis, he is not borrowing authority. He is reaching for a sentence that says, in fewer or stranger words, what doctrine has already said. Beauty becomes a teacher. The footnote becomes a sermon.
Have a quote we missed?
This archive grows by collaboration. If you know of a literary reference in conference — old or recent, obscure or beloved — we'd love to add it.
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