"To Mend A Fractured Reality: Joseph Smith’S Project"

[WalkerW]

Does anyone have a PDF of Philip Barlow, "To Mend a Fractured Reality: Joseph Smith's Project," Journal of Mormon History 38:3 (2012)? Or better yet, does anyone have the entire issue they could email me?

If you are feeling generous, please email me at choosedawright@yahoo.com. Thanks again.

[volgadon]

I tried accessing it thfough my university's account, but access to that issue won't be given til 2014.

[Damien the Leper]

What university is that? I would like to submit a complaint.

[Calm]

You might try someone at FAIR.

[WalkerW]

My university doesn't even have access to the Journal of Mormon History.

[WalkerW]

Bump

[David T]

I have a hard copy, because I'm a paid subscriber. When it comes to pdfs, I've had trouble accessing the online archive of newer issues that should be available for subscribers. This has been a fantastic year for publications in JMH, I suggest anyone who can even remotely afford to subscribe.

[Robert F. Smith]

Does anyone have a PDF of Philip Barlow, "To Mend a Fractured Reality: Joseph Smith's Project," Journal of Mormon History 38:3 (2012)? Or better yet, does anyone have the entire issue they could email me?

If you are feeling generous, please email me at choosedawright@yahoo.com. Thanks again.

I haven't seen the article, but you can see his lecture on YouTube:

Phillip Barlow, “To Mend a Fractured Reality: Joseph Smith’s Project,” Tenth Annual Eugene England lecture, deliviered at the Utah Valley University, March 24, 2011, and published in JMH, 38/3 (Summer 2012), 28-50.

Phillip Barlow, “The Fragmentation of Reality: Joseph Smith's Radical Remedy," delivered April 7, 2011, at the University of Wyoming, 83 min video at

– Associate Professor Quincy Newell says Smith has been interpreted variously: A visionary who sought to restore primitive Christianity; a fraud who came to believe his own delusions; a religious genius; a cultural scavenger who reflected folk beliefs of his time and place; and a "rough stone rolling" down a mountain who was tested and polished by God through adversity.

"With these interpretations, Barlow will discuss Smith's view on the fracturing of reality and his goal to heal, which entailed biblical, denominational, theological, ontological, existential, economic, political, social, racial, geographical, physical, and temporal dimensions," says Newell. "An attempt to grasp the breadth and depth of Smith's vision reveals much about Smith himself, about Mormonism and about antebellum religion and society in America."

Much of this apparently plays off of the research of Marvin Hill (various works), and of Robert N. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism: Why Joseph Smith Wrote the Book of Mormon (St. Louis: Clayton Publ., 1980); republished as Joseph Smith’s Answer to Skepticism (SLC: Signature Books, 1992), available online at http://signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=4589 .

[WalkerW]

This is fantastic. Thanks, Robert.

Edited August 27, 2012 by WalkerW

[mfbukowski]

Thanks Robert- I finally got to this. Brilliant stuff!

I see it yet as another vindication of viewing Mormonism through the lens of social constructivism- the (re)construction of a unified reality from based on the council of the gods- and embryonic gods- working together to connect the dots, creating reality from matter unorganized.

All Joseph was doing was what he saw God himself doing.

[volgadon]

Haven't had the time to view all of this, but I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity with R. Isaac Luria, the Ari. As the title of Lawrence Fine's biography implies, people viewed the Ari as a physician of the soul, a healer of the the cosmos. Something had gone wrong with the world and everything in it, which now requires tikkun, that is, mending. Many of the details differ, but the concept is very similar.

[mfbukowski]

I kind of hate to even bring it up in this metaphysical context- the contrast is too jarring, but I will say it anyway. Even if one looks at Wittgenstein, he saw himself as a therapist- he was not out to "solve" all the diverse problems of philosophy but to heal them in a sense- to illustrate a methodology which would make the perceived problems disappear in the light of understanding them correctly. And this was to be accomplished by understanding our greatest cultural tool: language. The idea is that we have the tools available to solve all our problems using our greatest intellectual tools if we but use them correctly.

[volgadon]

I kind of hate to even bring it up in this metaphysical context- the contrast is too jarring, but I will say it anyway. Even if one looks at Wittgenstein, he saw himself as a therapist- he was not out to "solve" all the diverse problems of philosophy but to heal them in a sense- to illustrate a methodology which would make the perceived problems disappear in the light of understanding them correctly. And this was to be accomplished by understanding our greatest cultural tool: language. The idea is that we have the tools available to solve all our problems using our greatest intellectual tools if we but use them correctly.

In some ways, Wittgenstein was one of the most Jewish of modern philosophers.

[Robert F. Smith]

Thanks Robert- I finally got to this. Brilliant stuff!

I see it yet as another vindication of viewing Mormonism through the lens of social constructivism- the (re)construction of a unified reality from based on the council of the gods- and embryonic gods- working together to connect the dots, creating reality from matter unorganized.

All Joseph was doing was what he saw God himself doing.

Yeh, and that's what we're doing too, Bukowski. We're here carrying out the will of that Council in which we were full participants. A noble and meaningful beau geste.

[Robert F. Smith]

Haven't had the time to view all of this, but I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity with R. Isaac Luria, the Ari. As the title of Lawrence Fine's biography implies, people viewed the Ari as a physician of the soul, a healer of the the cosmos. Something had gone wrong with the world and everything in it, which now requires tikkun, that is, mending. Many of the details differ, but the concept is very similar.

Yeh, tikkun ha'olam.

[WalkerW]

I'd love for you to expand on this:

In some ways, Wittgenstein was one of the most Jewish of modern philosophers.

[volgadon]

I'd love for you to expand on this:

I'll have to brush up on my Wittgenstein, but the most obvious aspect I can think of is his concept of language being what drives the world and gives it meaning, that there is holistic power in language. Martin Buber was blatantly Jewish in his thought, Wittgenstein, OTOH, was more intuitive. There is also an interesting parallel to R. Nahman of Breslav, I'll look for the thread where it was discussed here.

[volgadon]

What university is that? I would like to submit a complaint.

Ironically, the same one Barlow teaches at.

No need to file any complaints, JMHA has to come up somehow with the money to stay afloat. I'd rather wait a bit than have them sink.

[mfbukowski]

In some ways, Wittgenstein was one of the most Jewish of modern philosophers.

In many ways he was, and from another perspective he wasn't. I think his attitude was perhaps the Jewish part.

For one thing, he was essentially a mystic. He believed that if one could not speak of things clearly, one should not speak of them at all, at least thinking that one was doing the discipline of philosophy as he understood it. So speaking about Kabbalah for example, would never be "philosophy" nor would it literally "make sense". On the other hand, perhaps he would say that the intent of such discourse was not to make sense in the first place.

So that leaves metaphysics out of the picture entirely. Substances and essences were out of the picture if one thought one was doing "philosophy" because those were, as we Mormons would say, "a mass of confusion".

Yet there was the realm of the "unspeakable" which I think to him was direct sense experience or even religious experience. There is nothing one could say about it- it was incommunicable

Religiously he was probably an agnostic- in the sense of "bracketing" the question of God- that would be in the realm of the unspeakable at least if one wanted to speak of it logically. And yet it seems that he was a believer, if anything arguably Catholic which was the religion in which he was raised.

But certainly his attitude was one of a therapist- he fits right in there with Freud and Jung on that account. All the confusions of philosophy were caused by misunderstandings of language- essentially what he was saying in two or three words, was that they were semantic problems which would disappear if we simply analyzed the language sufficiently.

The role of the philosopher, like a good therapist, or doctor, was to put himself out of business by solving the problems and then allowing the healthy "patient" to go on with life.

[WalkerW]

bump

[mfbukowski]

bump

I was just reading the thread about resurrecting the dead, and now thou hast resurrected this thread, hey?

Well this might be something that fits with this thread

http://opinionator.b...dit_ty_20120917

My topic was romanticism, and the argument kicked off from the idea that the extraordinary burst of creative energy that we associate with romantic poetry comes out of a disappointment with a religious, specifically Christian, worldview. Poetry becomes secular scripture. In other words, romantic art announces the death of God, an idea that catches fire in the later 19^th century. It’s a familiar story.

Things went pretty well. But right at the end of the final lecture, something peculiar happened. A member of the audience asked me a question. He said, “What you have been telling us this week about romanticism and the death of God where religion becomes art is premised on a certain understanding of God, namely that God is unitary and infinite. Would you agree?” “Sure,” I said, “At least two of the predicates of the divinity are that he/she/it is unitary and infinite.” Gosh, I was smart back then. “But what if,” he went on, “God were plural and finite?”

Concealing my slight shock, I simply said “Pray, tell.” Everyone in the room laughed, somewhat knowingly. And with that the chairman closed the session. I went straight up to my questioner and pleaded, “Tell me more.” Thirty minutes later, over a caffeine-free Diet Coke in the university cafeteria, he explained what lay behind his question.

“You see,” my questioner said, “in his late sermons, Joseph Smith developed some really radical ideas. For a start, God did not create space and time, but is subject to them and therefore a finite being. The Mormon God is somewhat hedged in by the universe, and not master of it. The text to look at here is an amazing sermon called ‘King Follett,’ which was named after an elder who had just died and was delivered in Nauvoo, Ill., a few months before the prophet was murdered. He asks repeatedly, ‘What kind of being is God?’ And his reply is that God himself was once as we are now.”

He leaned in closer to me and continued in a lower voice,“If you were to see God right now, Smith says, right now, you would see a being just like you, the very form of a man. The great secret is that, through heroic effort and striving, God was a man who became exalted and now sits enthroned in the heavens. You see, God was not God from all eternity, but became God. Now, the flip side of this claim is that if God is an exalted man, then we, too, can become exalted. The prophet says to the company of the saints something like, ‘You have to learn how to be gods. You have to inherit the same power and glory as God and become exalted like him.’ Namely you can arrive at the station of God. One of our early leaders summarized the King Follett sermon with the words, ‘As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be.’ ”

“So, dear Simon,” my new friend concluded, “we, too, can become Gods, American Gods, no less.” He chuckled. I was astonished.....

Mormonism is properly and powerfully post-Christian, as Islam is post-Christian. Where Islam, which also has a prophet, claims the transcendence of God, Mormonism makes God radically immanent. Where Islam unifies all creatures under one mighty God to whom we must submit, Mormonism pluralizes divinity, making it an immanent, corporeal matter and making God a more fragile, hemmed-in and finite being. And obviously, both Islam and Mormonism have a complex relation to the practice of plural marriage.

Yet unlike Islam, for whom Muhammad is the last prophet, Mormonism allows for continuing revelation. In a way, it is very democratic, very American. Article 9 reads, “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.” In principle, any male saint can add to the stock and neverending story of revelation and thereby become exalted. From the standpoint of Christianity, both Islam and Mormonism are heresies and — if one is genuine about one’s theology, and religion is not reduced to a set of banal moral platitudes — should be treated as such.

Like Bloom, I see Joseph Smith’s apostasy as strong poetry, a gloriously presumptive and delusional creation from the same climate as Whitman, if not enjoying quite the same air quality. Perhaps Mormonism is not so far from romanticism after all. To claim that it is simply Christian is to fail to grasp its theological, poetic and political audacity. It is much more than mere Christianity. Why are Mormons so keen to conceal their pearl of the greatest price? Why is no one really talking about this? In the context of you-know-who’s presidential bid, people appear to be endlessly talking about Mormonism, but its true theological challenge is entirely absent from the discussion.

If that ain't mending reality, I don't know what is!

Edited September 20, 2012 by mfbukowski