Here are a few brief comments about Quinn's new revision of his astounding book (which is double in size from the first edition.) They are not intended to get into deep doctrinal waters which are beyond the purview of AML-List.

This time around Quinn emphasizes several times that, in comparing elements of Mormon history with traditions of Christian mysticism, "parallels are not proof." His modesty seems to indicate that Quinn's book is a theory; one possible interpretive framework that is necessarily incomplete and merely suggestive. In one reads the book in that spirit, your can be edified and even entertained. In particular, chapters 5 and 6 are a tour-de-force literary analysis of the LDS canon that makes the various deconstructors, post-modernists and new historicists of the modern academy look like little wimps. Quinn's boldness reminds one of Harold Bloom (whose book The American Religion leaned heavily on the first edition of Early Mormonism.)

For a perceptive review of the 1987 edition of this book (which still applies) see Benson Whittle in "BYU Studies" Fall 1987 pp. 105-121. He points out how an understaned of the "Hermetic Tradition" (Hugh Nibley's phrase) in Mormonism can help counter the sterility of creeping Protestantism in LDS culture.

R.W. Rasband
Heber City, UT
rrasband@yahoo.com