<Ahem> Please pardon me; it would seem that
I spoke too soon. The posting is classic, tone-deaf, insensitive DCP. He opens with a rather moving and seemingly heartfelt account of attending a funeral earlier today. He even notes some musical numbers that he would like to be played at his own funeral--traveling music, I suppose, as he makes his way up to the heaven depicted in
Added Upon. But, then three asterisks ("***") mark an extreme change in thought, and we're left with the jarring juxtaposition of this solemn and mournful reflection of a dead friend, with "dirty" Mopologetic gossip:
SeN wrote:I’ve just been alerted to a claim being made online that, as a result of a pair of critical reviews of The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts, eds. Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018) that we published by the Interpreter Foundation back in 2019– the two reviews in question are Jeff Lindsay’s “A Precious Resource with Some Gaps” and John Gee’s “The Joseph Smith Papers Project Stumbles” — John Gee and I were summoned to the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City, where unidentified Church leaders “yelled” at us because of our offense.
This claim is misleading in important ways.
It is true that certain people connected with the Historical Department of the Church were not happy about those two critical reviews — who loves to be negatively reviewed? — and it is true that John Gee and I met (entirely willingly) with a couple of the principal figures in the Joseph Smith Papers project to talk about the reviews.
Good grief! Can't some days be just for reflection? Can a person spend just *one day* acting like a normal human being, and taking a break from Mopologetics and instead celebrating a life that's passed? I guess not, because he goes on:
But the meeting took place in the Church Historical Library, not in the Church Office Building. No leaders of the Church were involved (assuming that, by “Church leaders,” General Authorities of the Church are intended). And there was absolutely no “yelling.” It was an entirely civil conversation, conducted entirely in conversational tones of voice. One misunderstanding that needed to be clarified was that the criticisms in the two reviews were directed solely at certain aspects of that fourth volume, not at the entire volume, and certainly not at the Joseph Smith Papers project as a whole (let alone at the Church or at its leaders).
This is a straight-up admission that they'd plotted a direct smear campaign against Brian Hauglid, and possibly Jensen as well. But as other have noted, this *does* also mean that they are impugning the judgment of the people who tapped Hauglid and Jensen to do this. There really is no escaping that basic point, especially given the Church's top-down power structure. And bear in mind that, if they truly did object to the material in that volume, there were lots of other avenues/channels they could have explored prior to publishing Gee's two "hit pieces." They don't think that someone with Hauglid's views should be allowed anywhere near the JSPP, except they don't have the courage to simply call him an "apostate" in public. And yet, for some reason, they appear to have compunctions about ratting him out to the GAs, or his SP, or whoever else.
However, as a matter of fact, I have never been rebuked by any General Authority of the Church, nor by any combination of General Authorities. Never.
I hope that’s clear enough.
Not true. The most obvious example, of course, was the expulsion of "Classic FARMS" from the Maxwell Institute. But there were multiple other occasions, of course--often in the form of phone calls from Salt Lake City. So, I guess this is all about the way one defines "rebuke"?