Item Detail
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33066
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0
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4
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English
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"Fast from that Which is Not Perfect”: Food Abstinence and Fasting Cures in the Kingdom of God
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Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Summer 2023
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56
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2
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Dialogue Foundation
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5-32
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"This article reframes the DCCS’s [Davis County Cooperative Society's] fast not as the product of male revelation but as the embodiment of a woman’s religious life. While Orlean [Kingston] is mostly invisible in the historical record outside of devotional literature, she produced a discernible impact on the community. Like women mystics who came before her, Orlean was both celebrated and chastised for her devotional food abstinence and subsequent visions. The sister of the DCCS’s founder, Orlean spent years fasting, receiving subsequent visions, and documenting dreams associated with food abstinence. Through the later years of her life, Orlean painstakingly experimented with what she believed was the ideal diet for communion with the divine, a more complete Word of Wisdom. Her diaries reveal a woman whose embodied devotion often confused her small religious community and whose belief in a perfected body raises contemporary questions about religious women’s pathologized faith. Had Orlean been a Mormon man, she might have been a prophet. Nevertheless, her largely invisible and ultimately broken body is the foundation for one of the DCCS’s most controversial marks of the Kingston devotional body." [Author]