Carl J . Cranney

Joseph Smith died before the practice of sealings had been wholly unfolded and implemented. In particular, what Brian Hales calls the “vertical” sealing of parents to children (as opposed to the “horizontal” sealing of men and women as husbands and wives) was never performed by the time of Joseph’s death, though there had been hints that sealings could be performed for relationships other than marriages. Brigham Young’s introduction of the “law of adoption”—which allowed couples to be sealed to a married priesthood leader as a father figure—was another further development. But it was in 1894, under the presidency of Wilford Woodruff, that the tradition of sealings reached the form that has not been significantly altered since, setting the stage for the Latter-day Saint emphasis on the importance of biological families that continues to this day.

This analysis will make clear that the final development—Woodruff’s— is the most theologically complete (though not without its own complications) and that there have been no major structural developments of vertical sealings since then because of this theological completeness. Woodruff’s developments added a coherence and a theological rigor, with compelling practical implications, which had been lacking previously. This coherence and theological rigor are the major reasons why no major developments in the Latter-day Saint vertical sealing rituals have been enacted since 1894.

In his work on poetic parallelisms in the Book of Mormon, Donald W. Parry has demonstrated that that book is replete with Hebrew poetry and parallel- isms such as chiasmus. Through analyzing individual texts, this paper seeks to determine whether the patterns Parry points out are deliberately included in the Book of Mormon. Texts selected for the analysis include those that (1) are self-contained with regard to the larger narrative, (2) are explicitly included as embedded documents, and (3) whose authorship is clearly stated or implied; twenty texts totaling 884 verses meet those criteria. After analyzing the per- centage of each texts that has parallelisms, it becomes clear that texts created for oral recitation (sermons) have a substantially higher percentage of parallelisms than those created for written circulation (narratives, proclamations, and letters). Since a major purpose
of poetic parallelisms is to facilitate memorization for oral delivery, this means we find parallelisms precisely where we would expect them to appear in the Book of Mormon, thus lending credence to the hypothesis that these parallelisms are deliberate and not accidental.

Taylor Petrey’s Tabernacles of Clay makes the argument that “in modern Mormonism, gender is a fluid concept that must be secured and produced” and that the concepts of sexual fluidity and malleability “are best expressed by queer theorists” (15). This book is Petrey’s attempt to put queer theory in conversation with the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unfortunately, he fails at the second task, and the first assertion is not entirely correct, either.

There are three basic groups to whom this book will be of interest. For historians, the book does yeoman service in compiling in one volume a chronology of statements by Church leaders on these subjects. For those interested in gender studies, they will find those portions short and the discussion lacking. For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I cannot recommend the book. Petrey simply ignores too much uniquely Latter-day Saint doctrine, even if such doctrine was historically more backgrounded than it should have been. His work will not be as useful for those who think the Church’s consistent teachings on these issues might be, at most, further refined and clarified, but who would be opposed to the substantial revisions Petrey clearly desires.