The Midgley-Bohn Misalignment
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2012 8:53 pm
In a bizarre twist of fate, it turns out that the somewhat unique apologetic positions of Louis Midgley and David Bohn may have inadvertently played a part in the demise of the Maxwell Institute as an apologetics-oriented venue. In another thread, I've been credited with predicting the demise of the LTG within the MI, but it's noted that I was unaware of the causal factors. According to Bill Hamblin:
Well, gee guys, thanks for telling us all this was going on. We -- or at least I -- thought all was well in Zion. It's not like you folks have been particularly complimentary of the works here at Cassius on the MI's turn to read the Book of Mormon as "Moby Dick", the Mormon Studies re-imaging you're criticizing now. How come none of you said anything like, "Hey Dr. Scratch, you know, you're right, for the last decade, there has been this huge emphasis to study the Book of Mormon as a literary and cultural phenomena rather than a challenge to modern archeology and historiography, and the quality is really tanking. We're feeling the heat here, we can barely get anything published that deals with archeology!" When I said the LTG was dead within the MI via the circumstantial evidence from what would be its very last publication, how come you didn't jump up to give me a high five, as you're essentially saying the same thing I did, but with knowledge of the actual causal factors I was not privy to? I feel like Dr. Hamblin owes me a retroactive high five. If the situation were reversed, I would give Dr. Hamblin and J. Green a high five.
But the plot thickens. Why I never would have thought to make the call that there was a war going on internally between Mormon Studies and traditional apologetics given the huge amount of evidence for it, is that I just assumed the "Emperor" was behind the whole thing. Consider this tidbit I've posted before:
"In a sense, New Mormon historians challenge the foundational beliefs of Mormonism in a quest for professional rigor. Adding to Midgley’s complaint about objectivity, David Bohn argued that historians could never really be detached from their subject matter.27 Bohn and Midgley harassed New Mormon historians on BYU campus and followed some to their places of worship to argue the anti – modernist perspective and enlighten clergy and lay members of the dangerous teachings of New Mormon historians."
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewc ... _stwriting
Midgley and Bohn are the ones who brought the postmodernist influences to the MI in the first place. The foundations of "Mormon Studies" are the very insights of Midgley and Bohn, and Midgley has been posting forwards to the Review and postmodern arguments against critics right along side of the New Guard up until the very end. If anyone knew there was an unhappy tension here based on the publicly available evidence, I owe that person a big high five, because I missed it. But hindsight is 20/20, and a most stunning revelation comes from David Bohn's reflection on the matter at T&S:
http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/20 ... oncerning/
I hope you're all following along to here, because this revelation is staggering. Bohn, recall, is almost as much of a fan of Immanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida as Mr. Stak, and uses their results to paint critics as men of violence (..to the letter!). But as it turns out, this guy's subtext runs much deeper than the war with critics, and it appears that he sees the binary opposition of good and evil as a general structure within the world, where bad=modern and good=postmodern. In this case, good=his apologist friends, bad=the Mormon Studies faction. It really ties your brain in knots, look at this closing sentiment:
"It would be a terrible loss if the Institute’s mission were reduced to only a “safe” and narrowly defined program involving the digitalization and study of ancient texts.."
Wait, hold on a sec here. What about the papers by Bradshaw promoting William James the pragmatist (you know, Derrida, Levinas, ...James?). What about the 10-year long power struggle Hamblin called out that Bohn himself cited, and the taking over of the Review as a Mormon Studies publication that barely allows contributions from the original team? The taking over of the Review with articles devoted to the the kind of postmodern interpretation of Mormonism that he and Migdley brought to the MI? He's totally missing this.
About the "New Guard", he says:
This totally misses the mark. The "neutrality" of the New Guard is not rooted in methodological naturalism, but in the "theoretical" underpinnings of Derrida and others he himself has brought to attention of LDS scholars that a "text" does not have a fundamental interpretation. In other words, Bohn is totally wrong to see the New Guard as enlightenment boogeymen who, as critics, only believe in science and in this case, therefore, stick to easy stuff like digitizing texts. The New Guard appear ready to full-on take up his and Migdley's anti-enlightenment project! It's the New Guard that realize apologetics -- dispite Bohn's protests to the contrary -- is trapped in the enlightenment. Some have pointed out one of Bohn's failures in the comments section, that FARMS's evidential approach to justifying scripture isn't much different than the critic's approach to denying it, in broad terms of classifying the kind of arguments. Just because FARMS might use rhetoric to downplay "truth" and critics might use rhetoric that extols "truth" doesn't count for much in my opinion. Well, my opinion doesn't matter much, let the Yale-conference inspired tactics of the New Guard speak for itself. Mormon Studies, like Religious Studies, is "beyond" debates over archeology, Mormon Sudies will dismiss Mopologetics just as Religious Studies dismisses overt Christian apologetics. While the comment section properly questioned Bohn's classification of FARMS as post-enlightenment, I didn't see that it dealt with his bigger blindspot, the reality is, the Mormon Studies faction is best described as the maturing of his own anti-enlightenment brainchild.
The ideology that Bohn and Migdley brought to the MI, ironically, in the hands of others, has overthrown the institution as a traditional apologetics organization.
Hamblin wrote:his event concludes a nearly decade-long struggle for the soul of FARMS and the Institute. The contemporary Maxwell Institute is something quite different from the FARMS of ten years ago. (Note that only one of the five “directors” of the current Institute is actually involved in Book of Mormon Studies: http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/about/a ... ration.php). Astute observers will note that there has been a steady decline in both quantity and quality of Institute publications over the past few years.
They may also observe that most of the original core of FARMS scholars from a decade ago, including me, have nearly ceased publishing with the Institute, having been systematically marginalized, alienated, or ostracized by the Institute as it tried transform itself to conform with this new vision. Needless to say, most of the original FARMS scholars have been dismayed by this inexorable movement to remake the Maxwell Institute.
Well, gee guys, thanks for telling us all this was going on. We -- or at least I -- thought all was well in Zion. It's not like you folks have been particularly complimentary of the works here at Cassius on the MI's turn to read the Book of Mormon as "Moby Dick", the Mormon Studies re-imaging you're criticizing now. How come none of you said anything like, "Hey Dr. Scratch, you know, you're right, for the last decade, there has been this huge emphasis to study the Book of Mormon as a literary and cultural phenomena rather than a challenge to modern archeology and historiography, and the quality is really tanking. We're feeling the heat here, we can barely get anything published that deals with archeology!" When I said the LTG was dead within the MI via the circumstantial evidence from what would be its very last publication, how come you didn't jump up to give me a high five, as you're essentially saying the same thing I did, but with knowledge of the actual causal factors I was not privy to? I feel like Dr. Hamblin owes me a retroactive high five. If the situation were reversed, I would give Dr. Hamblin and J. Green a high five.
But the plot thickens. Why I never would have thought to make the call that there was a war going on internally between Mormon Studies and traditional apologetics given the huge amount of evidence for it, is that I just assumed the "Emperor" was behind the whole thing. Consider this tidbit I've posted before:
"In a sense, New Mormon historians challenge the foundational beliefs of Mormonism in a quest for professional rigor. Adding to Midgley’s complaint about objectivity, David Bohn argued that historians could never really be detached from their subject matter.27 Bohn and Midgley harassed New Mormon historians on BYU campus and followed some to their places of worship to argue the anti – modernist perspective and enlighten clergy and lay members of the dangerous teachings of New Mormon historians."
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewc ... _stwriting
Midgley and Bohn are the ones who brought the postmodernist influences to the MI in the first place. The foundations of "Mormon Studies" are the very insights of Midgley and Bohn, and Midgley has been posting forwards to the Review and postmodern arguments against critics right along side of the New Guard up until the very end. If anyone knew there was an unhappy tension here based on the publicly available evidence, I owe that person a big high five, because I missed it. But hindsight is 20/20, and a most stunning revelation comes from David Bohn's reflection on the matter at T&S:
http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/20 ... oncerning/
I hope you're all following along to here, because this revelation is staggering. Bohn, recall, is almost as much of a fan of Immanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida as Mr. Stak, and uses their results to paint critics as men of violence (..to the letter!). But as it turns out, this guy's subtext runs much deeper than the war with critics, and it appears that he sees the binary opposition of good and evil as a general structure within the world, where bad=modern and good=postmodern. In this case, good=his apologist friends, bad=the Mormon Studies faction. It really ties your brain in knots, look at this closing sentiment:
"It would be a terrible loss if the Institute’s mission were reduced to only a “safe” and narrowly defined program involving the digitalization and study of ancient texts.."
Wait, hold on a sec here. What about the papers by Bradshaw promoting William James the pragmatist (you know, Derrida, Levinas, ...James?). What about the 10-year long power struggle Hamblin called out that Bohn himself cited, and the taking over of the Review as a Mormon Studies publication that barely allows contributions from the original team? The taking over of the Review with articles devoted to the the kind of postmodern interpretation of Mormonism that he and Migdley brought to the MI? He's totally missing this.
About the "New Guard", he says:
Bohn wrote:•others might hold that because the prejudice which enshrines neutrality is so wide spread among researchers, the work at the Institute will only gain currency if its framing language reflects such an objectivist bias..
•most might argue that, without being disingenuous, adopting elements of the well-mannered idiom associated with the neutralist’s position has the advantage of reducing the edge of exchanges with those somewhat antagonistic to Mormonism, while still gaining the respect of fellow academics and the broader non-Mormon readership.
This totally misses the mark. The "neutrality" of the New Guard is not rooted in methodological naturalism, but in the "theoretical" underpinnings of Derrida and others he himself has brought to attention of LDS scholars that a "text" does not have a fundamental interpretation. In other words, Bohn is totally wrong to see the New Guard as enlightenment boogeymen who, as critics, only believe in science and in this case, therefore, stick to easy stuff like digitizing texts. The New Guard appear ready to full-on take up his and Migdley's anti-enlightenment project! It's the New Guard that realize apologetics -- dispite Bohn's protests to the contrary -- is trapped in the enlightenment. Some have pointed out one of Bohn's failures in the comments section, that FARMS's evidential approach to justifying scripture isn't much different than the critic's approach to denying it, in broad terms of classifying the kind of arguments. Just because FARMS might use rhetoric to downplay "truth" and critics might use rhetoric that extols "truth" doesn't count for much in my opinion. Well, my opinion doesn't matter much, let the Yale-conference inspired tactics of the New Guard speak for itself. Mormon Studies, like Religious Studies, is "beyond" debates over archeology, Mormon Sudies will dismiss Mopologetics just as Religious Studies dismisses overt Christian apologetics. While the comment section properly questioned Bohn's classification of FARMS as post-enlightenment, I didn't see that it dealt with his bigger blindspot, the reality is, the Mormon Studies faction is best described as the maturing of his own anti-enlightenment brainchild.
The ideology that Bohn and Migdley brought to the MI, ironically, in the hands of others, has overthrown the institution as a traditional apologetics organization.