Donnie Bradley

Donnie Bradley explores the aesthetic and theological dimensions of Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction, proposing that art serves as a “little laboratory for godhood.” Examining stories like “The Circular Ruins,” “The Library of Babel,” and “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Bradley traces Borges’s autopoetic narratives—texts that describe the conditions of their own creation—and their resonance with Mormon theology’s vision of gods creating worlds to encourage their inhabitants to become creators themselves.

Donnie Bradley argues that religious thought contains untapped potential for formal mathematical systems, pointing to Joseph Smith's claim of solving "mathematical problems of universities" and James Strang's vision of making "religion a science studied by laws as exact as mathematics." He explores the Talmudic hermeneutic of Qal wa-Chomer, which judges propositions only relative to each other rather than deriving them from axioms—a structure that can model concurrent computation through cellular automata. Bradley suggests that religion's millennia of experience coordinating competing interests (like the "dining philosophers problem" in computer science) and its cross-cultural drive toward unification parallel mathematics' own aesthetic of depth and beauty, exemplified by Euler's formula.