Professor Peter Coviello

Well, no one's more rusty than I, but we'll try.

Yeah, let's do it.

Very, very, very quickly, he writes the Book of Mormon in upstate New York and gathers around him a bunch of detractors, but also a lot of followers.

Over the course of the decade, Mormons migrate west.

Joseph Smith is intensely charismatic and also intensely theologically imaginative.

So he writes the Book of Mormon, but he keeps writing and he keeps thinking and he keeps proselytizing.

And as he does so, the faith gathers to itself more adherence and a more vehement kind of detractor.

Well, I mean, it depends on who you ask, right?

They understand themselves as a vigorously counter-Protestantism.

Oh.

That is to say, like, the whole point of Mormonism, or not the whole point, but a big point of Mormonism is millennia of religion has conspired to get you to believe that God is different from you, that the world is fallen.

In fact, this is incorrect.

Christianity itself is an apostasy.

Why?

Because God is a brethren human, and you yourself in the mortal world

are living in an unfallen body.

And you yourself are speeding toward divinization because God wants everything that's best about human life, embodiment, joy, friendship, love, to be eternalized.

And to be yours in eternity.

So yeah, that's the pitch.

Yes.