I don't care what does anything for you. The current administration of the MI (and Bradford is not alone) had a different vision of the MI. The old guard had become stale and prevented the MI from getting more new life.
No Loyd, there have a distinctly secularist, rationalist/positivist flavor to what Bradford wants to do, which shows up succinctly in some of Bradford's other essays at MI, as well as his statement at Mormon Scholars Testify. Its a flavor he mixes fluently with the gospel, but not enough to mask the taste of the reason
or faith, apologetics
or scholarship bias he and his associates have introduced.
Droopy wrote:Bradford clearly doesn't want to do apologetics at all, or even be in the same room with it, which is odd in the extreme, for a Latter day Saint.
Says who?
Says me.
I hear a bunch of chatter about this but have seen no source for such a claim.
http://mormonscholarstestify.org/2508/m-gerald-bradfordhttp://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... m=1&id=640Read these thoroughly, Loyd. The core psychological and philosophical elements that have led to his behavior regarding the MI and its founding members are easily discernible throughout both these essays.
This claim seems to come from DCP and his pal Hamblin who are bitter and have repeatedly lied about the situation at the MI.
You're now even beginning to talk like Scratch and Graham, and you bring railing accusation against your brethren in the Church with the same self assured abandon, a sure sign that where I suspected you were heading, years ago, was not at all off the mark.
To the contrary, it is my understanding that Bradford and others at the MI realize that much of the scholarship they produce will inevitably be apologetic.
That's not what I get from his own written words on the subject.
They are not against apologetics in whole but are rather against much of the poor polemical apologetics that Peterson et al had been producing the last several years.
I don't know what you're talking about - and neither do you. This is all of a piece with the emerging
narrative of the NOM/Neo-Orthodox intellectual set who fancy themselves a new emerging philosopher king class among the LDS intelligentsia and the Church's membership (as the September Six and the core of apostate intellectuals gathered around Signature Books do) who are in awe of their own reflections. No good will come to the Church in all of this, of course, as this is all an exercise in the flattery of the intellectual egos of a small but apparently powerful group of LDS intellectuals who wish to mediate a process of accommodation between the Church and the surrounding secular culture.
Joanna Brooks, another key example of this kind of intellectual, is indicative of just where this tendency leads, if unchecked.
There are only two persons on this board that I would consider friends: MsJack and Chris Smith-hardly apostates. As for me, if my bishop and stake president find me worthy for a temple recommend (which I renewed last month) and to be a Sunday school teacher (which I taught today), then I think I would hardly count as an apostate.
That all depends upon what's in your mind and heart, not your outward behavior alone. Good heavens, Harmony's got them all fooled. You've been a hearty and uncompromising critic of the Church of Jesus Christ since I first encountered you at the FAIR board, and nothing leads me to think that you have not continued on that path in the intervening time. Yes, there are wolves among the flock, and some of them are actually feeding the flock.
Those who persist in this manner will, I am confident, be exposed in the end as the wheat and tares mature.
I know nobody else on this board--and in fact I "defriended" Kevin several months ago for being a putz and accusing me of being a blind apologist.
I can't think of any reason to consider you an apologist at all, which means that Graham is even loonier than I suspected.