Hi, I'm Ben.
I wrote a book and I'm excited to share it with you!
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Pride & Paradox
Pride: a high or exalted attitude, the opposite of the virtue of humility, which is the appropriate posture people ought to have with God.
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Paradox: a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained proves to be well founded or true.
A journey to discover humility. A journey through my own darkness to get to the light.
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Elder Fernando R. Castro
(Member of the Tenth Quorum of the Seventy, Professor of Religion at BYU-Idaho, stake president, mission president)
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“Pride & Paradox is engaging, honest, thought-provoking. It will challenge you to think differently about what humility might be and how to approach it. This needs to be read by anyone who feels called to develop this elusive Christlike attribute.”
Nora Castro
(Mission president’s companion, ward Primary president, seminary teacher)
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“It is hard to believe that such words of wisdom came from a 26-year-old young man. The book has the potential to help young adults but also many other members with doubts and misunderstandings about Church doctrine and the teachings of prophets, and specifically the views and interpretations which several leaders have had relating to certain controversial issues such as race or same-sex attraction. Ben has proven with this book that a loving Heavenly Father is willing to send light and truth to all those who seek and ask, no matter their age and circumstances.”
Jesse Egbert
(Professor of Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University)
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“Pride and Paradox is unusual in the best possible sense. Equal parts riveting narrative and doctrinal exposition, this book plunges the reader into the author’s struggle for truth and answers—a struggle that is both supremely personal to the author and universally applicable to the human experience. The subject matter—Christlike humility—is notoriously abstract and elusive. Yet the reader steadily progresses alongside the author through a dialectic narrative that is at times as rapid and exhilarating as an extended tennis rally, and at other times as slow and methodical as a chess game. This is one of those rare books that left me thinking hard and feeling deeply long after I turned the last page. The material is raw and painfully honest. Yet the delivery is polished and pleasant to read. I hope this book finds its way to readers from every faith and all walks of life so they can learn from it as I did. Most of all, I’m thankful that Ben shared this story, and I sincerely hope this isn’t the last one he writes.”
Reader Reviews
About me
I was raised in Lindon, Utah, as the third of six kids to my wonderful parents. I love my family, including my siblings-in-law and nieces and nephews, more than I can say. A few weeks after I turned 18, I graduated from Pleasant Grove High School and then spent two life-changing years as a missionary in the California Ventura Mission. Following my mission, I started college at BYU, where I majored in linguistics and minored in philosophy. After college graduation and a gap year as a Law and Corpus Linguistics Research Fellow at BYU Law School, I enrolled as a student at Harvard Law School. I’m currently in my third year of law school. Barring catastrophe, I’ll graduate with my J.D. this May (2022), and then I’ll work as a law clerk for a judge in Kentucky (2022-23) and another judge in Ohio (2023-24).
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