Content area
Full Text
Mormonism, Death, Salvation, and Exaltation The Mormon Culture of Salvation: Force, Grace, and Glory, by Douglas J. Davies (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 302 pp.
DOUGLAS DAVIES "GETS" Mormonism, as demonstrated by his latest book. This book is not his first. Mormon Spirituality: Latter-day Saints in Wales and Zion was published in 1987 and is also a must for scholars interested in understanding Mormonism. Davies approaches Mormonism from a unique point of view, one that derives from his interest in death (see his Death, Ritual and Belief, published in 1997). The Mormon Culture of Salvation, he tells us, grew out of his interest and previous research on death. But this new book is about much more than death. The reader is continually drawn away on other adventures that reveal nuances of the Mormon experience that are not typically addressed in religious scholarship. For example, at one point Davies leads the reader into analysis of embodiment; exploring embodiment in relation to the temple, as well as in domestic (home and family) and community (ward) living. Later, in an attempt to describe the operation of power, charisma, and authority within the modern bureaucracy, he offers up various phrases as carriers of the root paradigm of Mormon authority: "the mantle," "the keys," "the brethren," "the calling," and "the Church," "the Prophet," "the Temple."
Drawing from the embodiment literature of the social sciences, Davies argues that the body is central in the human process of self-understanding and...