Mormon Studies Review
Keywords
polygamy, divinization, Joseph Smith, Coviello
Abstract
This is a book you will want to sit with, think with, mull over, and then read over again. It was not until my second reading that I saw the double entendre of the title—Make Yourselves Gods—and how well it captures the layers of Coviello’s analysis. The phrase is first of all a quote from Joseph Smith, and it signals the expansive ambitions for divinization that early Mormons embraced with a prophetic fervor that culminated in the practice of polygamy. Despite the patriarchal order that came to define polygamy, Coviello argues, early Mormon women too reached for the embodied ecstasies—prophecy, tongues, the joys of the flesh—that could lead to their divinization. With Coviello as your guide, you will see these ecstatic expectations as the antithesis of secular ways of being that were then beginning to prevail. But that is just step one.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Wenger, Tisa
(2021)
"Provincializing Secularism: On Protohomonationalism and its Counterpossibilities,"
Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 8:
No.
1, Article 9.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol8/iss1/9