a cultural history of the book of mormon: volume five: Book Fantasia

A fantasia on the Book of Mormon. This final volume of the cultural history looks into the future, having seen enough of the past. A collection of related essays imagining what is possible from the Book of Mormon, it ponders the book into a fantasia. The collection begins with a reading of Nephi's Vision which opens a rather different perspective on the Book of the Lamb, the subject of an imaginative reconstruction. The third essay of the volume tells a fantastical and tragical tale of the Remnant, recipients of the Book of the Lamb, and long waiting with scales over their eyes. Their role in creating New Jerusalem is explored, a future again taking us back to the Book of Mormon's scene of at-one-ment, when Christ glorifies his disciples and they are one with him and the Father. The relationship between Christ and the one he calls Father is imagined across the essays, and most clearly in a new reading of Atonement derived from the pages of the Book of Mormon. Short fantasias give us guesses about the book's geography, and provide a reading of the Book of Moroni, regarded as the preface to the Sealed Writings of that same author. Finally, a wholly exploratory essay concludes the volume by pointing to a need to ponder the Name, baptism in it, calling upon it, and praying in it.