It seems pretty clear that he sees little value, if any, in the work done by the Maxwell Institute (a.k.a. the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, or FARMS) prior to its sudden adoption of a dramatically different “new direction” in June 2012: “Holland’s and Shalev’s arguments,” he says, “provide context for new, novel, and noteworthy insights concerning the book that previous studies could hardly fathom” (174). “Now that the shackles of Mormon historiography’s exclusive nature have been shed, the real work of contextualization and interpretation can begin” (175).
What, exactly, does Dr. Park mean when he speaks so positively about “chop[ping] away at Mormonism’s distinctive message” and shedding the “shackles” of “Mormon historiography’s exclusive nature”? Is the Book of Mormon really “just another voice in a rancorous [nineteenth-century American] chorus”?
When a Maxwell Institute editor, writing in this BYU Maxwell Institute publication, laments the “the parochial and exceptionalist framework that has so plagued Mormon studies in the past” (174) and celebrates its apparent passing, is he referring, as he seems to be referring, to the kind of work on the Book of Mormon associated over the past six or seven decades with such figures as Sidney Sperry, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson, Richard Lloyd Anderson, John W. Welch, John Tvedtnes, and Noel Reynolds, and, indeed, with FARMS itself?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterso ... alism.html