(emphasis added)DCP wrote:Some here will want to be aware of the newly-published book A Great Mystery: The Secret of the Jerusalem Temple: The Embracing Cherubim and At-One-Ment with the Divine (Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2008).
Written by the late Dr. Eugene Seaich of Salt Lake City, whom some of us knew, the book argues that, in the view of those who built the ancient Jerusalem temple, humans become divine through spiritual union with God -- a union that was represented by what he contends was the marital embrace of the cherubim in Solomon's sanctuary, which itself represented a sacred marriage. The book has been kicking about in manuscript form for quite some time, but, thanks to the efforts of my friend Bryan Thomas, of Denver, has finally seen the light of day in print.
http://www.mormonapologetics.org/index. ... opic=40249
Already, this post is interesting. Here we have someone, apparently a friend of The Good Professor's, who was "kicking about" an apparently unpopular manuscript, and whose book embraced a theory which (coincidentally?) manages to support certain Mopologetic claims. Furthermore, one of DCP's friends helped to get the book published.
Anyways, for those interested in the book, it can be purchased here:
http://www.gorgiaspress.com/bookshop/sh ... e2d2a2e646
Unfortunately, you will have to cough up the tidy sum of $125.00
Intriguingly---and perhaps do to his network of "associates"---DCP was not required to pay the full price:
Daniel Peterson wrote:Unfortunately, it's very pricey. I got mine for 50% off at an academic symposium in Boston last month.
Was this a 50% discount given over to all symposium participants, or did The Good Professor receive a special, Mopologetic discount, as it were, due to his special "connections"? At the very least, I think that one cannot help but marvel at the incredible series of social networks, price gouging, coincidences, gossip, and behind-the-scenes deal-making that brought this book into being. Just think: this book would never have been published had it not been for DCP's "friend," and furthermore, notice how the premise of the book neatly supports a key Mopologetic argument. And, DCP managed to score a whopping 50% discount on it to boot!
It turns out that even the endorsements on the back cover of the book have deep Mopologetic connections:
DCP wrote:The book is endorsed on the back cover by Margaret Barker and the late Raphael Patai, and it features a foreword by Steve Wiggins, whom I especially appreciate because of his important work on the goddess Asherah: A Reassessment of 'Asherah': A Study according to the Textual Sources of the First Two Millennia B.C.E (Neukirchen-Fluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1993).
We all know who Margaret Barker is, if only from K. Shirts's endless name dropping in his now-infamous YouTube films: "Bill Hamblin's in Oxford! He's meeting with Margaret Barker! Say hello to Bill Hamblin! He's in Oxford!"
I have to say, there are an awful lot of astonishing coincidences here. One wonders if Mopologetics is possible *without* a network of "back-slapping bros."