Yale and the FARMS Money Trail: A Case Study

[_Jersey Girl]

"I see stupid people."

I think you meant:



It's my curse.

Quite the contrary. It is your legacy.

[_Alf O'Mega]

Oh, and on the subject of Yale, coincidentally I took my family today to the Yale University Art Gallery, which is currently hosting an exhibit of Van Gogh's The Starry Night and Cypresses. It was a lot like religious experiences I am familiar with, including both transcendence and fussy kids.

[_Nevo]

I just said that I've never talked with Richard about Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. I don't know what he thinks about it these days, nor do I know, off hand, what he ever thought about it.

Bushman gave his brief opinion of EM&MWV in one of his MormonStories podcasts. He noted that there are problems in it, but overall, the "book is genius" (I think were his words).

Bushman offers his opinion of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View in part three of the series at 59:35:

The trouble is, his book, it doesn't really put things in balance. What it does is it just piles it higher and deeper; it gets this huge material, collects it all, and assumes that this vast quantity of lore which developed over the centuries was in the minds of everyone who ever went out and searched for buried treasure. So it kind of leads you astray at the same time as it opens up a new world to you. So I think it's a fabulous work of scholarship--ingenious I must say--but [chuckling] I mean it's really overblown in so many ways.

I think it is pretty clear that, while Bushman admires the labor and ingenuity that went into the book, he finds the work as a whole very problematic.

(For what it's worth, when I questioned him about the book nearly a decade ago, he replied simply that Quinn was an "assiduous" scholar and left it at that.)

[_Gadianton]

Alf,

Welcome to the board. You made some fantastic points in your post.

[_Bond...James Bond]

Alf Omega in the house!

If consig shows up this board might just explode from awesomeness overload.

[_Mike Reed]

Mike: Bushman gave his brief opinion of EM&MWV in one of his MormonStories podcasts. He noted that there are problems in it, but overall, the "book is genius" (I think were his words).

Nevo: Bushman offers his opinion of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View in part three of the series at 59:35:

Thanks for the citation, Nevo.

[_Daniel Peterson]

I haven't found a usage manual that approves of this redundancy, and I've read enough of your writing to know that it is certainly deliberate.

I don't think I've used it in formal or published prose. I don't think I would.

I smell a running private joke with Bill Hamblin. Am I warm?

Sorry, but no. There's no significance to it. And, so far as I know, Bill Hamblin doesn't look in here.

I read this to mean that blocking Quinn was at least partly (and perhaps primarily) a defensive move by the BYU organizers to prevent a backlash from BYU's administration and possibly their GA overseers. Despite some of the overheated conspiracy theorizing that is au courant in these parts, I think it's very likely that the Maxwell Institute and its predecessors have always been in a somewhat ticklish position with the powers that be.

I'm sure that that was a factor.

As in any organization as large as the Church hierarchy, there are inevitably disagreements over how best to accomplish its mission, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that Dr. Peterson occasionally has to finesse some touchy political equations to continue his apologetic work as he'd like to. He can probably only do so because he has cultivated relationships with sympathetic GAs who are in a position to champion his work among others who are suspicious of its value.

Again, am I warm?

Yes. I haven't cultivated such relationships, particularly, but I have them.

And I think that the reservations that a few of the Brethren seem perhaps to have had about FARMS in the past -- which we mostly knew of by plausible-sounding rumor -- are now largely gone.

And no, I'm not going to provide Scratch with lists of names of General Authorities and transcripts of conversations with and between them.

[_degaston]

.... This board is pretty small potatos. I haven't heard any talk of the topic anywhere else ....

If 166,000+ postings is "small potatos" then what is "big potatos"? The combined totals of two places you've visited totals nearly a million posts now. ZLMB has around 260,000 postings so far. MA&D has 700,000+. Yes this mormondiscussions.com forum is smaller in comparison. But don't forget that we live in the age of google.com, Blackberries, iPhones, etc. and its quickly impacting how earnest seekers of truth can research topics. Just now I went on my Blackberry to google.com and searched on "questions Mormons". The first 2 sites that came up were http://www.Bible.ca/mor-questions.htm and http://www.towertotruth.net/Mormon/witn ... stions.htm.

I searched http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2 ... tnG=Search and I can't even find mormondiscussions.com on any of the first few pages of results. However there are 68 references to Quinn here using Google right now according to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2 ... tnG=Search so its not that google.com ignores mormondiscussions.com in its searches. Its just that there are many more sites than this one that have discussed the "BYU-Yale Quinn Exclusion of 2003".

by the way go pair "Michael Quinn" with "Mormon" on google.com and you get about 15,400 hits. Do the same with "Daniel Peterson" and you get about half as many.

[_harmony]

And I think that the reservations that a few of the Brethren seem perhaps to have had about FARMS in the past -- which we mostly knew of by plausible-sounding rumor -- are now largely gone.

Death tends to make people largely gone, yes.

[_Daniel Peterson]

.... This board is pretty small potatos. I haven't heard any talk of the topic anywhere else ....

If 166,000+ postings is "small potatos" then what is "big potatos"? The combined totals of two places you've visited totals nearly a million posts now. ZLMB has around 260,000 postings so far. MA&D has 700,000+. Yes this mormondiscussions.com forum is smaller in comparison.

Take a random survey of Mormons (let alone of non-Mormons) and ask them if they've heard of this place, or of ZLMB, or of the board formerly known as FAIR. A minuscule percentage will have heard of them, and only a subset of that will have viewed one or more of them, and only a tiny subset of that will have posted on one or more of them. In LDS intellectual life, these places don't rate very high. Simple fact. And blogs and message boards are ephemeral.

[by the way go pair "Michael Quinn" with "Mormon" on google.com and you get about 15,400 hits. Do the same with "Daniel Peterson" and you get about half as many.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to signify. If it's supposed to embarrass me by confronting me with my insignificance, the tactic won't work: I've never boasted of my supposed importance, and, anyway, I don't measure my significance by the number of hits I get on the web. I've never even thought about that.