Later this week, I’ll be presenting for the first time at the International Jacques Ellul Society. My paper is called Image and Word in Mormonism’s Foundational Media Events, and I’ll be using Ellul’s image and word framework in The Humiliation of the Word as an explanatory framework for how the founding events of Mormonism can be understood by scholars and believers as either the sure-and-certain image or the ambiguous and fleeting word. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saints and their leaders tend to prefer the image over the word, and I think Ellul’s writing helps understand why this is (beyond the obvious reasons)