Professor Peter Coviello

Yeah, right.

And all that you and I have been talking about today was, well, that was really not inevitable.

And in many respects, it wasn't desired necessarily.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so that sacralization, yeah.

And of course, there are a lot of Mormons who do not accept

The renunciation of polygamy.

They think it is for cheap and worldly expedience.

And that's where the FLDS fundamentalist Mormon church comes from.

And there's plenty of segments in still polygamous West who understand themselves precisely as fundamentalists, as not having ceded the ground of what to them was essential to

To the theology, to the lived theology of Mormonism, which was given up in their view for the cheap and expedient reason of statehood, which for Woodruff was like, well, that's going to save our lives.

That's going to keep us from being annihilated.

Yeah, it's nice to not have a third of the federal government ringing your city.

The ironies rebound and rebound and rebound across the 20th century.

Sure.

Though others are better able to speak of that than I.

Peter, is there a website that we should be looking at, ways to keep track of you?

I am the head of the English department at UIC in Chicago, and you can look, if you put in my name in Chicago, you'll find more than enough about me there.