new presentation on Jacques Ellul and Latter Day Saint technical responses to COVID-19

Later today, I’ll be presenting during a Mormon Social Science Association session of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. For a few years now, I’ve taken an interest in the way that the two largest “Mormon” denominations—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ—had different technical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former embraced digital platforms as a replacement for its denominational conferences but rejected digital platforms as an intermediary for its sacred rites, the latter showed the opposite pattern. In the presentation, I will use Jacques Ellul’s recurring comparison of the image and the word to try to tease out what might explain these different patterns of adoption. I have a page set up for the presentation in the Research section of my website, complete with a link to the slides I’ll be using (presuming I don’t further edit them in the next 90 minutes!).

• Community of Christ
• online Mormonism
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• MSSA
• MSSA 2026
• SSSR