Item Detail
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32071
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6
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26
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English
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Recording Beyond the Grave : Joseph Smith’s Celestial Bookkeeping
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Critical Inquiry
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2016
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42
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4
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Chicago, IL
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University of Chicago Press
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842-864
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"Out of a vast array of rich materials in Mormon media history, this essay focuses on Smith’s two letters from September 1842 about baptism for the dead, which are at once doctrinal landmarks authorizing the church’s vast genealogical program and fundamental statements about the nature of recording media. The letters have rarely been analyzed or placed in a larger historical context, perhaps due to their rather dry discussion of bureaucratic documentation, and there is certainly much more in them than this essay can address. But the apparent mundaneness, I will argue, is a key to their power. The letters show both the cosmic ambitions of a new world religion and the media-technical project of inscribing the entire human family into a single book. A prolific producer of scriptures and revelations, Smith was just as fascinated with the medium of writing for its data processing, even algorithmic powers. Written records not only provided content to read but revealed the structures of creation; they were as ontological as they were informational. Diverse scholars have sought to show Smith’s ties to esoteric sources in folk magic, hermeticism, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry, but the picture is incomplete without his interest in the dusty realms of accounting, archives, and bookkeeping. His theurgic audacity expressed itself in part by clerical means. Smith’s materialism went so deep as to find eternity in a ledger." [Author]
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