DiscussMormonism.com

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... l=23&num=1

In intend to comment on some of the individual articles in more detail later on, but for now I wanted to offer some preliminary thoughts. First of all, the FARMS Review is actually now called the Mormon Studies Review. As Dr. Peterson says in his Editor's Introduction:

Now, though, we come to yet another name change. The FARMS Review becomes the Mormon Studies Review. The change, which I sincerely hope really will be the last one, signals the breadth of the subject matter that the Review has treated over the past several years. It relieves us of the obligation (which we once tried to meet but have long since abandoned) of trying to review every single item published on the Book of Mormon, however trivial, obscure, and/or insignificant. It was, however, largely compelled by the fact that, with the rise of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the name FARMS is receding rapidly into the background and we didn't want the name The FARMS Review to survive merely as a fossil reminder of that earlier stage of the history of the organization (particularly since the name FARMS has always been a bit awkward, drawing calls to our receptionists from members of 4-H clubs seeking counsel about raising pigs for competitions at the state fair).

What this means, of course, is that I will continue to call it the FARMS Review. I cannot help but wonder if this name change was also an effort to possibly confuse the Mormon Studies Review with the similarly named Mormon Review, since this latter effort is headed up by the respectable Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens. It wouldn't surprise me if this similarity came up during one of the MI's planning sessions.

Also of interest was this:

DCP wrote:Professor Robinson's insightful response to a collection of mostly sectarian criticisms of the Book of Mormon resulted in the publisher and owner of Signature Books, George D. Smith, instructing his attorney to threaten legal action. By so doing, Smith was seeking to use the courts to silence responses to criticisms of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon rather than employing the traditional tools of scholarship, argument, and the analysis of evidence. I was determined not to be intimidated by this gambit, and I responded to this legal mischief in the next editor's introduction to the Review.

Note Prof. Peterson's "bravery" here, and compare it with his cowardice in the face of similar "threats" from Robert Ritner. You cannot help but wonder why the one was worth fighting and the other wasn't. Perhaps DCP feels that it would be too much of a challenge to paint Ritner and Yale as anti-Mormon, whereas it was possible with Signature?

Also intriguing was this:

I wanted the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon to be something that would have value in itself, that would be worth buying and reading in its own right.

Fortunately, that goal was achieved right from the start.

DCP appears to be saying here that there was something of a financial motivation behind the launch of the review. (There is a humorous tidbit above this quote, where Prof. P. reveals his insecurities about his own sense of taste, but I'll save commentary on that for later.)

Perhaps most interesting of all is the epigraph, which supplies the title, and which was lifted out of Emerson's great essay, "The American Scholar":

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. . . . He is the world's eye. —Emerson

It seems that this "rebranded" Review is yet another desperate attempt to convince people that the work therein is, indeed, scholarly. (It's not, though.) You can imagine my amusement as I opened up Greg Smith's spittle-flecked attack on the gay-friendly Web site M4M, only to see that Smith (now an associate editor--something that I announced much earlier this year, thanks to a "tip" from one of my "informants") thought it would be a good idea to include an abstract for his smear piece! This may very well be the ultimate in faux-scholarly window-dressing. My sense is that the "hatchet" has been handed over so Smith, and that he--the "Jeff Goldblum of FAIR"--was hand-picked to carry on FARMS's legacy of character assassination and warfare-tinged polemics. The Old Guard--DCP, Hamblin, Welch, Mitton--are going to sit back and watch the spectacle. (Midgley is still as angry and vicious as ever.)

In any event, I look forward to perusing the rest of this "steaming" pile in the coming days--preferably as I sip my post-prandial snifter of warm milk.

lol @ FARMS becoming Mormon Studies Review

What an awesome slap in the face for all the people in Mormon Studies outside the Mopologetic Circle.

That's like The Discovery Institute publishing a periodical called The Smithsonian.

MrStakhanovite wrote:lol @ FARMS becoming Mormon Studies Review

What an awesome slap in the face for all the people in Mormon Studies outside the Mopologetic Circle.

That's a good point. People like Don Bradley, Chris Smith, and others who do serious work in "Mormon Studies" ought to be crapping themselves in a dead panic about now.

Thanks for the heads up, professor. I was blown away by this issue for several reasons. First of all, it's only like 180 pages whereas the previous "issue 1" was over three hundred. Why does it still need to be broken up into two volumes?

Another thing I noticed is that there were no attacks on Chapel Mormons. For that, I give a thumbs up, perhaps we're seeing this publication mature? It's possible that one of the GAs gave the smack-down on this but it's also possible that the scholarship of various, independent thinkers at institutions such as Cassius have made some bridge-building progress and helped the MI staff see that they've been a bit hard on their well-meaning siblings.

Another positive for me was the tribute to Hugh Nibley. There seems to recently have been a strong Austrian faction within the MI that really went after Nibley's politics and Lou Midgley comes to the rescue in this edition with a pro-Nibley double whammy. Yet even more evidence that the MI had been in an "adolescent" stage, angry at the father of Mormon Apologetics, and now some reconciliations with Dad are on the table.

A large section of this edition is aimed at Criddle. I didn't read it, but by how technical-sounding the title is, I imagined a non-polemic piece. The only shortcoming here I think is that these rejoinders would better serve the Church if published in a peer-reviewed journal on par with Criddle's work. No, paying Oxford to publish from their press doesn't count!

One thing that struck me when reviewing some of the other pieces, more LGT posturing and whatnot, is I wondered if the "archeology" branch of the MI is losing steam, and the Mormon Studies department is poised to take over. I kind of got the feeling that these pieces were sort of a bone being thrown to the faithful old-school readership. I sensed no excitement about the subject, nor does there really seem to be anything new to say, just re-hashing of the same-old same-old. Let's face it, the LGT is an aging theory, and there's no new blood taking up the spade in search of a Mesoamerican Zerahemla. The LGT as a model will be a relic of intellectual history as the founders begin to pass on in the near future.

Finally, the title of Greg Smith's piece seemed odd to me, Shattered Glass?. I thought of the Donald Kaufman character in the acclaimed 2002 film Adaptation eagerly sharing the progress of his naïve and predictable screenplay with his brother, "Because of my multiple personality theme, I've chosen the motif of broken mirrors to show my protagonist's fragmented self". It turns out, Brittany Spears has a song called Shattered Glass and there was a Transformers episode of this title about a parallel universe where the good transformers were bad and the bad good. Naming one's artistic work "Shattered Glass" is well, pretentious, but in a very juvenile way.

Plus,the broken glass motif is somewhat unstable here. The full title of the essay is:

Shattered Glass: The Traditions of Mormon Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Encounter Boyd K. Packer

So here, BKP is the projectile, and the "traditions" of the M4M website are like glass?

Yet the last line of the essay reads:

If I were to help stone a man (or hold cloaks while others did so), I hope I would have the gumption to pick up the rock myself and hurl it in the full light of day—and then take the consequences.

So the M4M advocates are too "sneaky?" They should be more like BKP and throw the rock in the open and accept the consequences of the glass breaking? Or BKP broke the glass because in this motif the destruction shows the power of his righteousness, and Smith just inadvertently has the M4M people as projectile throwers with the righteous also as potentially glass? It's confusing for me, it would be like, if in the Brittany Spears song, the shattered glass referred to not only her relationship "breaking" but if shattered glass also represented getting back together after breaking up.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on this edition. A lot of weirdness and open questions for this one.

Doctor Scratch wrote:
It seems that this "rebranded" Review is yet another desperate attempt to convince people that the work therein is, indeed, scholarly. (It's not, though.)
.

And it isn't. The name change was due to the confusion the former name had with farming. The change is more on target. Nor does it claim to be a indepth scholarly review. If you read the articles, you will notice that some are written without the usual complicated sentence structure and vocabulary found in an academic journal. Now of course there are also articles with such a mixture of vocabulary. The journal is actually for people who are interested in Mormonism, mainly members, who do not have an overtly sophisticated vocabulary and who made be confused with academic sophistry. But at the same time, it is also for members who have knowledge of academic writing and do have a more academic sophisticated vocabulary. It tries to please everyone

To be scholarly the journal would need to make use of a host of sources.