Allen Hansen

Allen Hansen {[email protected]} is originally from northern Israel. An independent scholar, he has presented at various venues, including Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, the Mormon Transhumanist Association, and Sunstone. His online writing can be found at the blogs Calba Savua’s Orchard, Adventures in N-Town, and Difficult Run. He currently lives in Ogden, Utah, with his wife and daughter.

“All Things Unto Me Are Spiritual”: Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism

Articles/Essays – Volume 50, No. 1

In his 2005 commencement speech, the late novelist David Foster Wallace provided an unexpectedly frank description of American adulthood for the recent graduates of Kenyon College. Listing painfully familiar annoyances associated with what he calls the “day in day out” of middle-class America—including a hilarious retelling of the common supermarket experience—Wallace urges his audience to fight against their “natural, hard-wired default setting” that tells them they are “the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”