conference presentation on Jacques Ellul and Mormonism

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:28:31 -0400

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)

I’m quite excited about this, given how much Ellul has affected my scholarly (and, frankly, personal) thinking in the short time that I’ve been reading him. In fact, over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been putting final touches on my paper and slides (and doing other reading), I’ve been thinking that I’d like to use this as a starting point for a broader project on what I’m tentatively calling the “Latter-day Saint technical apparatus.” I’ve got another paper in mind for an upcoming special issue from Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and we’ll see if I can find time in the next three months to put that together.

Anyway, for anyone outside of IJES who might be interested, I’ve created a new entry in the Research section of my website that has some information about the presentation and a link to the slides that I’ll be using.

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conference presentation on Jacques Ellul and Mormonism