Have you ever wondered to yourself: "How am I here? What is holding the universe together?" Have you ever driven yourself insane trying to understand all of the different methods and theories humanity has used to answer these terrible questions? Understanding the universe and humanity's place within it is an absurd undertaking. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that has driven and baffled humanity for millennia. Fear not dear listener! Brandon Wilson and Christian Van Dyke are here to share in your confusion. Don your jester caps and professor robes as we analyze the laughably absurd!
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Have you ever wondered to yourself: "How am I here? What is holding the universe together?" Have you ever driven yourself insane trying to understand all of the different methods and theories humanity has used to answer these terrible questions? Understanding the universe and humanity's place within it is an absurd undertaking. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that has driven and baffled humanity for millennia. Fear not dear listener! Brandon Wilson and Christian Van Dyke are here to share in your confusion. Don your jester caps and professor robes as we analyze the laughably absurd!
Brandon Wilson -- Mormonism, Theurgy, and the Theurgic
The Analyst & The Fool
1 hour 3 minutes 4 seconds
1 year ago
Brandon Wilson -- Mormonism, Theurgy, and the Theurgic
For this special episode of The Analyst & The Fool, we bring you one of our first episodes ever recorded.
In this episode, we dissect this amorphous blob called Brandon Wilson; a PhD student at Claremont Graduate University. Brandon details a bit about his intellectual biography as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, getting introduced to the writings of Hugh Nibley, learning to think critically and ask penetrating questions about his faith, and how that led him to study esoteric subjects such as Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and theosophy under Jeffrey Kripal and Claire Fanger at Rice University. Now, Brandon is bringing these approaches to Mormon Studies in how Latter-day Saints experience their temple ordinances through comparing them with Neoplatonic theurgy. Invoking the comparative hermeneutics of Algis Uzdavinys in his work Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity, Brandon explores how Mormonism’s temple practices can be categorized as “theurgic” in nature, ritual actions that aid initiates to bring themselves into higher states of consciousness and align their actions with the actions of God. In this sense, Latter-day Saints aim to create heaven on this earth through these processes, thereby making God immanent and subject to human action/inaction.
The Analyst & The Fool
Have you ever wondered to yourself: "How am I here? What is holding the universe together?" Have you ever driven yourself insane trying to understand all of the different methods and theories humanity has used to answer these terrible questions? Understanding the universe and humanity's place within it is an absurd undertaking. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that has driven and baffled humanity for millennia. Fear not dear listener! Brandon Wilson and Christian Van Dyke are here to share in your confusion. Don your jester caps and professor robes as we analyze the laughably absurd!
