Item Detail
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31901
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3
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5
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English
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Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation
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Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon
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New York, NY
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Oxford University Press
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"In this essay I examine The Book of Mormon as a latter-day Book of the Dead, a purportedly ancient text that reveals truths for a modern world. Unlike the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in The Book of Mormon the keys to securing a place in the afterlife are not spells or incantations but—as befits a modern people—a true knowledge of American history and a Christian reformation of family and kin life that is necessary for salvation. The distinctive way it connects ancient and modern worlds can be illuminated through comparison with other contemporary efforts to join the living and the dead. I compare The Book of Mormon with Morgan’s secular ethnology and (more briefly) with the New Religion founded by Handsome Lake, two other transformations of kinship thinking that were rooted in western New York and that rested on textualizing voices of the dead. In all three cases, spiritual truths encrypted in the deep past are cross-fertilized with the modern doctrine of self-making through contract. The disparities among them, however, can teach us as much about secularity as it does about American religion." [Author]