Orson Scott Card and the Ontology of Redemption This paper will focus on Card’s thinking in general, but especially on the philosophically- significant novel, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. I will argue that the novel poses, in a profound way, what is entailed in the idea of redemption–and indeed, in the practice and the physics of redemption. Furthermore, the novel develops, in a way that is consistent with others of Card’s novels, the materialist orientation of Mormon theology. Finally, a conception of history at work in Pastwatch has more than a little in common with Marx’s dialectics.

Bill Martin, Dan Wotherspoon