{"id":43439,"date":"2022-08-24T11:37:16","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T16:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=43439"},"modified":"2022-08-24T11:46:09","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T16:46:09","slug":"in-memoriam-in-mourning-kate-holbrook-1972-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2022\/08\/in-memoriam-in-mourning-kate-holbrook-1972-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam, In Mourning: Kate Holbrook (1972-2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Times & Seasons friend and guest blogger Sam Brown has shared with us the obituary of his wife, eminent Latter-day Saint historian Kate Holbrook. We are honored to remember Kate’s contributions to LDS women’s history as co-editor of, among other volumes, <\/em>At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-Day Saint Women, The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-Day Saint Women’s History,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart.\u00a0Kate is remembered also for bridge-building between academic and civic communities, and for fostering rich social connections in the field of Mormon history. Finally, she is remembered as a gentle genius in the kitchen, a soul with a rare gift for friendship, and a radiant wife to Sam and mother to her three daughters.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here is Kate’s description of the heaven-on-earth she spent her life building:<\/em><\/p>\n

There is a pasture I love which I visit every summer. Horses and cows graze there. The sky, mountains, meadow, trees, and streams are beautiful. The air is clear. The animals have all that they need and they are safe there. To have all of us in a safe and beautiful place where we are known, seen, and cared for\u2014I want to be in that place and I want to help others to find it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We weep and rejoice that she has found safe pasture.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kate Holbrook (born January 13, 1972) died August 20, 2022, her mortal life ended by a
\nrare cancer of the eye that threatened for a decade before taking her from us over the
\ncourse of the last year. We are utterly bereft, and we are also filled with the joy of her
\nexistence. Kate was born in Santa Barbara, California, in the desperate confusion of the
\nearly 1970s, to Kathleen Stewart and Robert Holbrook. Kate was raised by her mother
\nand her grandmother, Belle Fillmore Stewart, in Provo, Utah. After serving a Church
\nmission to Samara Russia and graduating from Brigham Young University, she moved
\nto Boston because she\u2019d loved a rainy afternoon spent there when she was 13. There
\nshe worked at Boston University, graduated from Harvard Divinity School with a Master
\nof Theological Studies, and began a doctorate in Religious Studies at Boston University.
\nShe also met and married Sam Brown. In their middle 30s they realized that they were
\nat heart mountain people and returned to Utah. They are the proud parents of three
\nwonderful children: Amelia, Lucia, and Persephone Holbrook-Brown. In Utah, Kate
\ncompleted her PhD (remotely) and started her career as an historian of Latter-day Saint
\nwomen, employed by the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of
\nLatter-day Saints. She edited and\/or wrote many books, articles, and other expressions
\nof her careful thought and warm caring. She paid special attention in her scholarship to
\nthe relationships between food and religious community. Kate lived with abiding passion
\nand care. She read voraciously and with great sympathy. In the last year of her mortal
\ncourse, she fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting Kenya, driven by her childhood reading
\nof Out of Africa<\/em>. Her entire being sparkled with the possibilities of literature, including the
\nstories of East Africa and Karen Blixen.<\/p>\n

Kate loved Jesus with her whole heart. There wasn\u2019t a part of her that didn\u2019t breathe
\nGod and Gospel. She was honored to lead teams to tell the story of the Latter-day
\nSaints to outsiders and the stories of women to her fellow Saints. As she contemplated
\nher passage from mortality with great sadness, it was not because she lacked
\nconfidence in the reality of an afterlife. Instead, she mourned her physical absence from
\nthe mortal lives of her beloveds. She held in her hands and her heart both the certainty
\nthat death is not the end of us and the terrible tragedy of mortality cut short.<\/p>\n

Her father and her grandmother (beside countless generations of the ancestors she
\nhonored with her scholarly work) preceded her in death. The others remain, hallowed by
\nher memory and her abiding presence. Kate loved flowers the way she loved food,
\nviscerally. However, she asks that instead of giving flowers, well-intended friends
\ndonate to the Kate Holbrook Endowed Scholarship Fund at BYU for primary caregivers
\nof young children pursuing graduate work in the humanities:
\nhttps:\/\/kateholbrook.org\/scholarship<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Times & Seasons friend and guest blogger Sam Brown has shared with us the obituary of his wife, eminent Latter-day Saint historian Kate Holbrook. We are honored to remember Kate’s contributions to LDS women’s history as co-editor of, among other volumes, At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-Day Saint Women, The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-Day Saint Women’s History,\u00a0and\u00a0Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart.\u00a0Kate is remembered also for bridge-building between academic and civic communities, and for fostering rich social connections in the field of Mormon history. Finally, she is remembered as a gentle genius in the kitchen, a soul with a rare gift for friendship, and a radiant wife to Sam and mother to her three daughters. Here is Kate’s description of the heaven-on-earth she spent her life building: There is a pasture I love which I visit every summer. Horses and cows graze there. The sky, mountains, meadow, trees, and streams are beautiful. The air is clear. The animals have all that they need and they are safe there. To have all of us in a safe and beautiful place where we are known, seen, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":43440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Kate-Holbrook.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43439"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43443,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43439\/revisions\/43443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}