"Brilliant, Clever, Tragic," "Laugh out loud funny," "A Terrifically Insightful Work." Described as The Office meets The Bible, the tale told here is hardly to be believed. The Question: What happens when God and Mammon are made to synergize? In answer, this book opens the doors to Mormon corporate offices, most secret of spaces, and invites you inside. At the Church Office Building (it's actual name) spiritual ambitions speak through HR evaluations, missionary mission statements, digital converts, and scripture marketing campaigns. Hear employees chant "cultural beliefs" and test if a new DVD hits your "spiritual hot buttons." Watch us market food storage "solutions" to religious consumers! Read about the "best practices" of the corporate side, from smuggling underwear into banana republics to Mitt Romney's role in a billion dollar Church Mall. The author, an Ivy League trained cultural anthropologist, "works" (sometimes) as a media evaluator with the Mormon Church's corporate arm. During long lunches he traces the ins and outs of a religion being consumed by corporate culture, and you, Dear Reader, are invited along for the insights, laughs, and revelations. A compelling, light-hearted but serious memoir, sometimes fictional ethnography, and, yes, even apocalypse, this book crosses genres, fact, fancy, and everything between. Not for the faint of heart, dumb persons, or the casual reader.

The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons

History

Smith, Daymon M

World

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The record translated and published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon was composed by Mormon and other authors in some sequence. Here at last we can read the text in its sequence of composition. The result is an utterly original reading of the Book of Mormon. This reading reveals surprises within the text itself. The biography of Mormon composed over three decades shapes the historical narrative; an original introduction to the earliest (and lost) abridgment is recovered from what is now called 3 Nephi; and a groundbreaking revision of the received tradition regarding the Small and Large Plates of Nephi is brought forward. Additional essays by the editor introduce evidence for an order of composition by Mormon, Moroni, and others. Material is presented that 1 Nephi was added in June 1829, and compiled from additional plates recovered from Cumorah. Other essays give new insights into the role of lineage in the transmission of records, speculate on an alternate history of the "lost leaves" of 1828, and introduce a theory of translation essential for scholarly study of the Book of Mormon. And happily, the text has been freed from the constraints of column and verse, and oriented to the epic and historic genres more appropriate for its wingspan and tragic grandeur, for appreciating the complexity of its composition.

The Abridging Works: The Epic and Historic Book of Mormon Arranged in Sequence of Composition

Smith, Jr. Joseph

Continuing the ground-breaking first volume's emphasis on Kirtland Restorationists, Part A of the second volume describes the particular textual practices that pinned their readings of the Bible onto the pages of the Book of Mormon, and spread that reading across a landscape.  This volume also reconstructs how these Restorationist's readings were scattered across the globe under the name "Mormonism" or "the Gospel," as the writings of Parley Pratt were copied, quoted, and fragmented into a thousand elders' voices.  This is Part A of Volume Two, which concludes with Part B, Follies Epic and Novel.  A preview of B is included here.

a cultural history of the book of mormon: Volume Two A: Voicing Being Power

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

MOST OF WHAT JOSEPH SMITH seemed to have hoped for, with respect to Saints on the Mississippi, came to an end with his death. The Saints did as they always do, picked up the pieces and carried on. Once in Utah, or Deseret as they insisted it be named, Mormons realized they were out of the lands Joseph Smith called Zion; living beyond the End they once thought would come in 1845. “What are we doing here,” you can still hear them asking in between the lines of sermon after sermon; in Brigham Young’s belligerence and retreat; in calling one another prophet, seer, and revelator, titles more hopeful than accurate; and in every apostles’ eagerly undertaken mission to Europe. The Book of Mormon was no help answering, after the Lord’s Chosen People had wandered to this desert. In Utah, as we see here, Mormons fell outside their myth: beyond the geography of Joseph’s American Eden, while the Lord’s Coming seemed long overdue. They looked for plume and pillar of fire over Sinai, for seraphim to place coals upon their lips, for the City of God to descend, its people to kiss their poverty from dry cheeks. They were Israel gathering. But that was all in the future, when Joseph Smith voiced the Lord in January 1841, and warned of them working cursings by their own hands. In this Part B of Volume Two, the cultural history explores the implications of their move from Nauvoo to Utah, from Joseph to Brigham, from Restorationism to Zionism. It shows what happens to Saints when they leave their map—the Book of Mormon—far behind, having so long misread it. Like what it says about kings, for example . . .

the cultural history of the book of mormon: volume two B: Follies Epic and Novel

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

The first part of Volume 3: In Beta Waves the author reconstructs how the modern institutional church arose from the Sunday Schools and YMMIA organizations, and how the Book of Mormon was reshaped as curriculum taught by generic instructors to imagined pupils. Central to this reshaping was the creation of an imagined Book of Mormon World, a work of writers like George Reynolds, Moses Thatcher, James Talmage, and B.H. Roberts. Their metatextual labor integrated the imagined World of the Book of Mormon with the rising administrative structure to give us a very different way of reading that book.

a cultural history of the book of mormon: volume 3: the cycles of deep sleep: beta waves

The second part of Volume 3: The spirit of deep sleep being cast upon the Saints, they cycle through increasingly phantasmagorical images of their past, as curriculum grows into a regime of copy-and-paste. The development of BYU Book of Mormon curriculum is thus reconstructed, and the missionary's message is watched as it changes from message found in the Bible, to a salesman's opportunity to sell his message, to a vast program that brings together sales programs, corporate evaluation techniques, self-help strategies, and much else from tradition to obscure the missionary's reading of the Book of Mormon. It concludes with analysis of Preach My Gospel, a compilation of metatext declared anonymously on authorized pages, to be voiced by and as the reader-missionary.

a cultural history of the book of mormon: volume 3: The Cycles of Deep Sleep: Delta Waves

Beginning with Book of Mormon inspired fiction from the early 1900s, this volume explores the landscape of imaginary works generated by that book. Included are analyses of Hugh Nibley's scholarly imagined creations, various fan fictions, more recent "Sealed Portions" and other "pseudepigrapha" like the Mentinah Archives, various Books of Lehi, among other oddities of scriptures, culminating with the Abyssinian Book of Mormon. The usual insightfulness and humor run through this Part A of Volume Four, a study of what we have dreamed up from the Book of Mormon so far.

a cultural history of the book of mormon: Volume Four A: What Dreams Have Come

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

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