The PhD Plan of Salvation

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I present to you:

Latter-day Saint readers will recognize this immediately. For the rest of you, this probably looks a bit weird. Basically, for the past couple of decades LDS students have been taught the "plan of salvation" (a set of fundamental LDS doctrines concerning our origin, purpose, and destiny) using what one of my Institute teachers cheekily refers to as "those hop-scotch diagrams." When teaching about the plan of salvation, Brother Richardson encourages his own students to re-create their own visual representation of the plan, using symbols that are personally meaningful to them. The second he mentioned it, this image sprang nearly full-formed into my mind. So I sketched a draft in class on Thursday, and today I took myself over to easel.ly to create the glorious infographic you see above.

Of course this representation is the thinnest of analogies, and it only works when held extremely lightly. For instance, I'm not sure what in a PhD program would be analogous to the atonement of Jesus Christ; I don't know that I even dare play with such a comparison. And it is absolutely not true that job outcomes reflect the "righteousness" of the PhD-holder, or that alt-academic jobs are less worthy than faculty jobs--in this case, my diagram reflects perceptions which I regard as rather unfortunate, not reality.

But from an affective point of view, the analogy does kind of work, and it was pretty fun to think about. Beyond that, I will leave it to you to explore the scriptures to see how each stage of the plan corresponds to a stage of the PhD process. If you think different scriptures make a better fit, please do suggest them in the comments--there's no reason I couldn't revise my little diagram. Here they all are in linky form:

• The Premortal Spirit World: "First Lessons" D&C 138:56
• Birth: "The Veil of Forgetfulness" Encyclopedia of Mormonism (this phrase is not used in the scriptures but is very common in LDS parlance; hence I link to the releveant entry in the EoM instead of the standard works)
• Earth & Mortality: "A State of Probation" 2 Nephi 2:21, 27
• Death: "I Will Prove You in All Things" D&C 98:14; D&C 29:42-43; D&C 101:36-37
• The Postmortal Spirit World: "Paradise or Prison" Alma 40:12-14
• "Judgment" 2 Nephi 9:15
• Our Final Estate: "Three Degrees of Glory" or a state of no glory 1 Corinthians 15:40-41; D&C 88:20-32