The First Ever Review of Salt Press and the New MI!
Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 7:03 pm
A review and response to the book, An Experiment on the Word, Salt Press 2011
by,
Gadianton P. Robbers, Phd.
As recent events have revealed, the vision for the Maxwell Institute is Mormon Studies, and the beating heart of Mormon Studies as understood by the administration apparently comes from a little-known publisher called Salt Press, which has recently been integrated into the Maxwell Institute. Salt Press published three books in its time, and given its board of editors were lifted to the board of editors at the Maxwell institute, a review of the work of Salt Press should give us a hint as to what's coming next from the Maxwell Institute.
The Salt Press book under review today is the second they published, it's a collection of "theological readings of Alma 32." What is a "theological reading?" As explained by Adam Miller in the introduction, "Theology participates in the illumination of patterns that show charity, produce meaning, and overwrite senselessness. Reading, theology maps meaning" and "Theology runs experiments for the sake of mapping a text’s own latent patterns. Its power to illuminate these unseen, latent patterns derives from its freedom to pose hypothetical questions: if such and such were the case, then what meaningful pattern would the text produce in response?"
Philosophers like to say they're doing one thing, when in fact, they're really doing something much more, or something else entirely. Socrates never just "asked questions" and I'll be damned if these folks are best understood as "showing charity" by "discovering latent patterns" within a text. I think it's more straightforward to say they are experimenting with interpretive techniques that arose broadly from postmodern theory and/or Western Marxism. I sifted through the references of all three Salt books examining sources cited, and the one scholar cited in all three Salt Press books is not Hugh Nibley, Richard Bushman, Margret Barker, Shakespeare, Neal A. Maxwell, Gordon B. Hinckley, or other common faithful intellectual favorite, but Jacques Derrida. Who? The Maxwell Institute has officially taken the postmodern turn -- sort of. James Faulconer is an expert on Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, though he does not mention them in his work here. Joseph Spencer, however, is an explicit Derridean in his essays for Salt. Julie M. Smith begins her essay in this volume, "The term “intertextuality” was coined by philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva to describe the practice of reading one text through the lens of another." Kristeva is an avant-guarde postmodernist and "founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee"(wiki).
For my review I decided to limit my comments to three of the six essays. I did not pick based on what I liked best or least, but by the writers who seem to be most core to the project. Faulconer is the veteran, so he's first, and Joseph Spencer seems to have written the most material for Salt, so he's second. For the final spot, I broke with the original criteria and went with Robert Couch, since his background is finance and not philosophy, literature, or religious studies. How does a finance professor contribute to a postmodern project, how does he perceive its grain and mimic it?
Desiring to Believe: Wisdom and Political Power
James E. Faulconer
James Faulconer is the LDS "go to guy" for continental philosophy, which not only informs Marxism, critical theory, and postmodernism but legitimizes belief-friendly "narrative history". Unlike the key figures from the continent, however, Faulconer is neither controversial nor wordy. From what I can tell, he's a true believing Mormon in the most ordinary sense. It's no surprise that Faulconer's essay, Desiring to Believe: Wisdom and Political Power understates his background, it's the one essay in this book that would work either as a contribution to Mormon intellectualism or an Ensign article. However, while Faulconer does not reference any theory, book, or person that could be considered controversial, in other words, anything at all from his area of expertise, there are some connections. His commentary is on Alma's and Korihor's respective gospels and it's predictable to find Alma's gospel of faith rooted in "desire" and Korihor's gospel of sign-seeking rooted in "wisdom". In the anti-modernist order of things, Dionysus, the god of wine and madness is "good" and Apollo, the boring and overrated god of light and truth is "bad".
Faulconer exposes much irony in the Alma narrative. Korihor sees the people of Alma, the "poor" cast out from the Zoromites, as enslaved by priests when in actuality, they are drawn to the gospel by freely acting upon their desire while Korihor is the slave, preventing himself from being drawn the same. For Korihor, "religion is a way for ordinary people to understand the world which justifies their oppression by their rulers." People serve (like slaves) the Messiah and they serve each other, rather then devoting themselves to looking after number one. But as it turns out, radical individualism isn't a great way to become powerful, as Korihor preaches, given he ends up a lonely begger in the street. And in a twist, Korihor is trampled and destroyed by the Zoromites, who Faulconer argues, "subscribe to a religion with beliefs that are in some ways like Korihor’s." Korihor's atheism and the Zoromite religion connect in sign-seeking. Korihor demands evidence, and so do the Zoromites, at least tacitly. If they don't seem to be in the market for signs, it's because they've already got them in their wealth and prosperity. Korihor's accusations against Alma should have been toward the Zoromites, who effectively had turned atheism into a religion, one that brings about the demise of Korihor. Korihor's philosophy then is his own undoing, and the undoing happens at several layers.
It would be difficult to find a better faithful commentary on the Alma material than Faulconer's, but outsiders may resist being impressed with Alma's strawman of 19th century naturalism. Outsiders may also consider the obvious connections between Zoromite displays of wealth and the LDS City Creek Center, the sign of signs, pointing to the Church's success (excess), unashamedly complimented by a policy that keeps beggers off of the streets. More to the point of Mormon Studies context, the storytelling of Alma is trivially binary, black and white, and told from the victorious perspective of a faithful religious historian. Alma is good and Korihor is bad, there is no ambiguity. Faulconer and his fellow commentators as far as I can tell, are using "close reading" techniques for insight into the naïvely faithful perspective, while keeping that perspective naïvely faithful. But as any student of poststructuralism must see, Alma and the poor are not the victims, but the oppressors; it's the anti-Christs whose voices are marginalized in the text, heels set up to lose in order for the righteous to prance around them and become the Fribergian celebrities hanging on the walls of the faithful. Korihor: a possibly misguided intellectual who exercised his right to free speech, decimated violently in seven layers of irony by the self-appointed purifiers of the temple. The Alma material is begging for a deconstructive reading. Such a reading would not be naïvely faithful, but it would not necessarily be unfaithful either. Grant Hardy has set down the path to show a "gritty" Book of Mormon, where heroes like Moroni are complex, dark characters that resonate with a modern audience accustomed to consuming morally ambiguous heroes in media -- think the re-imaging of Battle Star Galactica vs. the old noble story from the eighties or modern cop shows like The Wire or The Shield vs. CHiPs. Alma the sign-seeker deferred or Korihor, the marginalized faithful, could turn out to be fruitful avenues of investigation for a generation inspired by dark themes and moral complexity.
I think that outside intellectuals will have difficulty allowing Mormon intellectuals to use tools as sophisticated as deconstruction and semiology for justifying jello-salad Mormonism, especially when the Church is backed by a multi-billion-dollar power structure. I've dived a bit deep here given what Faulconer has actually written, but I'm also paying attention to the subtext. Faulconer is a key mentor to others using postmodernism more explicitly.
Faith, Hope, and Charity: Alma and Joseph Smith
Joseph M. Spencer
As a student at BYU, I had philosophy teachers read Alma 32 as a triumph of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which in turn was a triumph for the Book of Mormon, anticipating continental sophistication while having been translated in the thick of Francis Bacon's legacy of positivist fundamentalism. As Mark C.Taylor demonstrated in the eighties, Kierkegaard's germ of subjectivism naturally leads a path to the door of Jacques Derrida's negative theology of "differance". I wondered back then, when would Derrida have his day in Mormon thought? Derrida's message has arrived late, but arrived it has. Joseph M. Spencer review titled, "Alma and Joseph Smith" is based on Derrida's first "religious" work, The Gift of Death.
Spencer's expository objects are faith, hope, and charity. Faith and hope are also explicit objects of Alma 32. Spencer defines these terms and then ties them into a term missing from Alma: charity. Charity is typically invoked along with faith and hope in the scriptures, but not in Alma 32. Why is this? It turns out that, in fact, a close reading (what deconstructionists do, insisting "deconstruction" is a popularized, inadequate generalization of their work) of Alma 32 shows that charity pops right out as a hidden variable within the text. The importance? Navoo Theology. According to some, including anti-Mormons, the Book of Mormon represents Joseph Smith while still broadly within the Christian tradition, before he went rogue at Navoo and invented the temple. We've all heard the anti-Mormon claim that there is no Mormonism in the Book of Mormon. According to Spencer, however, cryptic verses following a discussion of faith and hope read, "he imparteth his word by angels unto men, yea, and not only men but women also. Now this is not all; little children..." After a tortured analysis, these verses are shown to imply genealogy and temple sealing, which are the unfolding of the missing term charity, and demonstrate that "Navoo Theology" was built upon the Book of Mormon, not a departure from it. One recalls Nibley's claim -- one he was forbidden to substantiate in print -- that the entire temple ceremony is found within the Book of Mormon.
Spencer prepares us for the negative theology of Derrida, "Alma 32:21 does not provide a positive definition of faith..." He explains, "To have faith is to be faithful to God’s word or name as it is imparted by a (true) messenger [angel, prophet, etc.]" and "hope is a question of one’s recognition of the real possibilities of the future." These are interesting definitions of faith and hope, especially when considered together, I will admit. The Derridean angle is then provided by the terms' links to the "invisible." The invisible, for Derrida, can be understood in two ways, approximating notions of kind and degree. Vocalized words are invisible because they cannot be seen (kind), and in this sense, "God" is invisible. For Spencer there is a link to faith here; presumably, God and his word are "invisible" and fidelity to the invisible, as the object of the fidelity, has no positive definition, it is intractable, as Derrida says, "God who sees the invisible and sees in my heart what I decline to have seen by my fellows". Hope, however, links to visibility by degree. In Derrida's example, a woman's nude breasts beneath her clothing, which may be revealed but presently are not, are invisible (by degree). Hope then seems to be tractable. In Derrida, I understand invisibility in degree to service invisibility in kind by contrast, and his discussion moves from God as invisible by kind to "the Other" as also invisible in this way. I feel that I grasp Spencer's Derridean exposition of faith, but I don't follow him on hope. I understand his definition of hope, but not its place in Derridean theology. I assume Spencer understands Derrida better than I do, so I'll leave that as a barrier I hit in my comprehension and not a criticism, and move on.
Spencer admits his project is ambitious. After the definitions of faith and hope in context of Derrida are provided, and some "close readings" tease "charity" out from neighboring verses, Spencer says that his speculation about the place of charity is perhaps "irresponsible", but then goes on to say, "Quite likely. But its irresponsibility must ultimately be said to be grounded in its fidelity" -- a predictable deconstructionist reversal; the possibility of logic lies in the discourse of madness etc.. In particular, Derrida plots out the "differance" between responsible and irresponsible in The Gift of Death, where irresponsibility is the marginalized term. For Spencer, this means he (Spencer) performs an "illegal" reading, and I take it that this is justification for his speculation -- "illegal" = "authentic". In the three-degrees-of-glory reading of Kierkegaard rather than the fully existential reading, the religious mode of existence is allowed to beat the system, violating the rules of the ethical. The religious life is the most authentic life for folks who read Kierkegaard this way. In my opinion, Spencer's justification for his ambitious project is more ambitious than his project is.
At any rate, the observations I made above in my comments on Faulconer's essay apply here also, Spencer is thoroughly faithful, using postmodernism to justify his faith with complex and impressive exegesis, but not to nuance it. This is why I said in the beginning the Maxwell Institute has not quite taken the postmodern turn. One wonders how acceptable this will be to outsider intellectuals. If the point of Mormon Studies is to communicate with the liberal academy and achieve recognition from them by speaking their language, they'll eventually have to really speak it.
Faith and Commodification
Robert Couch
In faith and commodification, a BYU finance professor critiques "commodified" society and religion parallel to Marxist interpretations of capitalism. Robert Couch likens personal search for God to growing and consuming one's home-grown commodities, such as produce. It's not that home-grown necessarily tastes better, but that "As we invest ourselves, a distinct desire is fostered that links us to the fruit." In a global produce market, a consumer enjoys no such link. The problem, specifically, is in being a "consumer". According to Couch, consumers of science objectify science the same way consumers of produce objectify fruits and vegetables -- a few quick Google searches and any scientific question is settled. In contrast, scientists, apparently, understand "faith", as they are forced to appreciate the trials of "nourishing the seed" and, therefore, hold the same privileged link to their theories that strawberry growers hold to their fruit. We can now anticipate the problem with theology, "As a theological system of beliefs becomes more elaborate and widely accepted, there is less and less need to pray, since the theological system can increasingly provide the answer to any question that might be posed." Much like consuming fruit from a market that offers good fruit for cheap, getting theological answers, even the right ones, eliminates the need for personal journey in one's relationship to God.
Many of Couch's points are interesting, but he takes advantage of idealized professions somewhat. The scriptures are from beginning to end, farming metaphors. Couch brings up crude oil regulations at one point, and I had to wonder, does the producer of crude enjoy his tank of gas in a way that consumers of oil do not? Do gastroenterologists have a special links to their stomachs that their patients don't? The answer is probably "yes" to both, but the profundity of such links is questionable. To me, Couch's most successful point is, "Happy homes cannot be cheaply bought and consumed." Are there objects of our desire that resist being objects, or commodities?
Whether it's strawberries, oil, or God, there seem to be many benefits to commodification. Consumers are also producers of something, and providing say, good customer service over the telephone is no less noble than growing good strawberries. One is done at the expense of the other. Further, as it would be chaotic for Americans to personally study all oil producers to gain a more thorough connection to the product they are buying rather than relying on market regulators, it would be chaotic for all Mormons to personally seek out God's attributes and broader plans for the world. Though a church built on revelation, Quinn noted that personal revelation was discouraged rather early in church history due to the arguments and confusion that resulted from contradicting revelations. It would seem that there must be a place for creeds and a repository of knowledge about God that can be consumed. There are two open questions, in my opinion: 1) Are there aspects of theology of the same kind as a "happy home" that seem to resist commodification? 2) Do Christian creeds objectify these kinds of knowledge in their creeds or discount their importance? It seems inevitable that answering these questions will bring out the debate over whether or not what we think is more important than how we live.
I think attempts to paint Mormonism as more authentic "how we live" religion than other religions, as a narrative theology vs. a systematic theology, will ultimately fail. There is likely a bell curve to the degree various religions fall into either camp, the creedal religions are unlikely all to be equally creedal. Plus, as James Faulconer has shown us, sign-seeking can be implicit. Just because a religion doesn't explicitly have a systematic theology by way of formal creeds, doesn't mean it doesn't have the same systematized structures lurking beneath the surface as the Zoromites did.
Reflections on the Maxwell Institute transition
I think Experiment on the Word has some interesting ideas, but I do not think that it is better than the traditional FARMS material. Alma 32 is one of the most philosophized chapters of the Book of Mormon, and while making for an interesting volume, I have to wonder just how many future works are viable. The material this volume covers is more than a little predictable in scope, if novel in details. I must admit that the traditional FARMS material, for whatever outrage it showed toward critics or pie-in-the-sky archeological proofs of Mormon scripture, it most definitely passed the "authenticity" test. Each volume had something unique. Volume one featured essays by dissenting members. Some book reviews in later volumes were over a hundred pages long, yet others were barely more than a scribbled note leaving one to think, "where did that come from?" Reviews of LDS board games? Right-wing condemnation of Hugh Nibley? Snooty dismissals of self-published Mormon authors? It was an unpolished work, often schizophrenic, and always outrageous and unexpected. But for all its failures, systematized theology was not one of them. The Review was what it was, and didn't care what anyone else thought.
I can't help but think the new Maxwell Institute will commoditize Mormon intellectualism as a small range of efforts fit for consumption by liberal-leaning religious studies scholars. I have a difficult time believing it will be able to hold the interest of a lay audience, but as I've written above, I also have difficulty believing that the target audience will fully appreciate what is quite obviously, an "apologetics of richness," and not an exercise to nuance the faith, as Hardy's work and Bushman's work at least sort of was. Ironically, the liberal world of Mormon Studies may find more sympathy for Mormonism if Mormon Studies scholars are allowed to be adventurous and cross real boundaries; to question their faith. If FARMS was accused of abusing the tools of science to service apologetics, the new Maxwell Institute may end up being criticized for abusing the tools of "theory" to service their parallel brand of promoting the faith. The writers here are very smart, but I just don't see the outside world buying into it.
by,
Gadianton P. Robbers, Phd.
As recent events have revealed, the vision for the Maxwell Institute is Mormon Studies, and the beating heart of Mormon Studies as understood by the administration apparently comes from a little-known publisher called Salt Press, which has recently been integrated into the Maxwell Institute. Salt Press published three books in its time, and given its board of editors were lifted to the board of editors at the Maxwell institute, a review of the work of Salt Press should give us a hint as to what's coming next from the Maxwell Institute.
The Salt Press book under review today is the second they published, it's a collection of "theological readings of Alma 32." What is a "theological reading?" As explained by Adam Miller in the introduction, "Theology participates in the illumination of patterns that show charity, produce meaning, and overwrite senselessness. Reading, theology maps meaning" and "Theology runs experiments for the sake of mapping a text’s own latent patterns. Its power to illuminate these unseen, latent patterns derives from its freedom to pose hypothetical questions: if such and such were the case, then what meaningful pattern would the text produce in response?"
Philosophers like to say they're doing one thing, when in fact, they're really doing something much more, or something else entirely. Socrates never just "asked questions" and I'll be damned if these folks are best understood as "showing charity" by "discovering latent patterns" within a text. I think it's more straightforward to say they are experimenting with interpretive techniques that arose broadly from postmodern theory and/or Western Marxism. I sifted through the references of all three Salt books examining sources cited, and the one scholar cited in all three Salt Press books is not Hugh Nibley, Richard Bushman, Margret Barker, Shakespeare, Neal A. Maxwell, Gordon B. Hinckley, or other common faithful intellectual favorite, but Jacques Derrida. Who? The Maxwell Institute has officially taken the postmodern turn -- sort of. James Faulconer is an expert on Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, though he does not mention them in his work here. Joseph Spencer, however, is an explicit Derridean in his essays for Salt. Julie M. Smith begins her essay in this volume, "The term “intertextuality” was coined by philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva to describe the practice of reading one text through the lens of another." Kristeva is an avant-guarde postmodernist and "founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee"(wiki).
For my review I decided to limit my comments to three of the six essays. I did not pick based on what I liked best or least, but by the writers who seem to be most core to the project. Faulconer is the veteran, so he's first, and Joseph Spencer seems to have written the most material for Salt, so he's second. For the final spot, I broke with the original criteria and went with Robert Couch, since his background is finance and not philosophy, literature, or religious studies. How does a finance professor contribute to a postmodern project, how does he perceive its grain and mimic it?
Desiring to Believe: Wisdom and Political Power
James E. Faulconer
James Faulconer is the LDS "go to guy" for continental philosophy, which not only informs Marxism, critical theory, and postmodernism but legitimizes belief-friendly "narrative history". Unlike the key figures from the continent, however, Faulconer is neither controversial nor wordy. From what I can tell, he's a true believing Mormon in the most ordinary sense. It's no surprise that Faulconer's essay, Desiring to Believe: Wisdom and Political Power understates his background, it's the one essay in this book that would work either as a contribution to Mormon intellectualism or an Ensign article. However, while Faulconer does not reference any theory, book, or person that could be considered controversial, in other words, anything at all from his area of expertise, there are some connections. His commentary is on Alma's and Korihor's respective gospels and it's predictable to find Alma's gospel of faith rooted in "desire" and Korihor's gospel of sign-seeking rooted in "wisdom". In the anti-modernist order of things, Dionysus, the god of wine and madness is "good" and Apollo, the boring and overrated god of light and truth is "bad".
Faulconer exposes much irony in the Alma narrative. Korihor sees the people of Alma, the "poor" cast out from the Zoromites, as enslaved by priests when in actuality, they are drawn to the gospel by freely acting upon their desire while Korihor is the slave, preventing himself from being drawn the same. For Korihor, "religion is a way for ordinary people to understand the world which justifies their oppression by their rulers." People serve (like slaves) the Messiah and they serve each other, rather then devoting themselves to looking after number one. But as it turns out, radical individualism isn't a great way to become powerful, as Korihor preaches, given he ends up a lonely begger in the street. And in a twist, Korihor is trampled and destroyed by the Zoromites, who Faulconer argues, "subscribe to a religion with beliefs that are in some ways like Korihor’s." Korihor's atheism and the Zoromite religion connect in sign-seeking. Korihor demands evidence, and so do the Zoromites, at least tacitly. If they don't seem to be in the market for signs, it's because they've already got them in their wealth and prosperity. Korihor's accusations against Alma should have been toward the Zoromites, who effectively had turned atheism into a religion, one that brings about the demise of Korihor. Korihor's philosophy then is his own undoing, and the undoing happens at several layers.
It would be difficult to find a better faithful commentary on the Alma material than Faulconer's, but outsiders may resist being impressed with Alma's strawman of 19th century naturalism. Outsiders may also consider the obvious connections between Zoromite displays of wealth and the LDS City Creek Center, the sign of signs, pointing to the Church's success (excess), unashamedly complimented by a policy that keeps beggers off of the streets. More to the point of Mormon Studies context, the storytelling of Alma is trivially binary, black and white, and told from the victorious perspective of a faithful religious historian. Alma is good and Korihor is bad, there is no ambiguity. Faulconer and his fellow commentators as far as I can tell, are using "close reading" techniques for insight into the naïvely faithful perspective, while keeping that perspective naïvely faithful. But as any student of poststructuralism must see, Alma and the poor are not the victims, but the oppressors; it's the anti-Christs whose voices are marginalized in the text, heels set up to lose in order for the righteous to prance around them and become the Fribergian celebrities hanging on the walls of the faithful. Korihor: a possibly misguided intellectual who exercised his right to free speech, decimated violently in seven layers of irony by the self-appointed purifiers of the temple. The Alma material is begging for a deconstructive reading. Such a reading would not be naïvely faithful, but it would not necessarily be unfaithful either. Grant Hardy has set down the path to show a "gritty" Book of Mormon, where heroes like Moroni are complex, dark characters that resonate with a modern audience accustomed to consuming morally ambiguous heroes in media -- think the re-imaging of Battle Star Galactica vs. the old noble story from the eighties or modern cop shows like The Wire or The Shield vs. CHiPs. Alma the sign-seeker deferred or Korihor, the marginalized faithful, could turn out to be fruitful avenues of investigation for a generation inspired by dark themes and moral complexity.
I think that outside intellectuals will have difficulty allowing Mormon intellectuals to use tools as sophisticated as deconstruction and semiology for justifying jello-salad Mormonism, especially when the Church is backed by a multi-billion-dollar power structure. I've dived a bit deep here given what Faulconer has actually written, but I'm also paying attention to the subtext. Faulconer is a key mentor to others using postmodernism more explicitly.
Faith, Hope, and Charity: Alma and Joseph Smith
Joseph M. Spencer
As a student at BYU, I had philosophy teachers read Alma 32 as a triumph of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which in turn was a triumph for the Book of Mormon, anticipating continental sophistication while having been translated in the thick of Francis Bacon's legacy of positivist fundamentalism. As Mark C.Taylor demonstrated in the eighties, Kierkegaard's germ of subjectivism naturally leads a path to the door of Jacques Derrida's negative theology of "differance". I wondered back then, when would Derrida have his day in Mormon thought? Derrida's message has arrived late, but arrived it has. Joseph M. Spencer review titled, "Alma and Joseph Smith" is based on Derrida's first "religious" work, The Gift of Death.
Spencer's expository objects are faith, hope, and charity. Faith and hope are also explicit objects of Alma 32. Spencer defines these terms and then ties them into a term missing from Alma: charity. Charity is typically invoked along with faith and hope in the scriptures, but not in Alma 32. Why is this? It turns out that, in fact, a close reading (what deconstructionists do, insisting "deconstruction" is a popularized, inadequate generalization of their work) of Alma 32 shows that charity pops right out as a hidden variable within the text. The importance? Navoo Theology. According to some, including anti-Mormons, the Book of Mormon represents Joseph Smith while still broadly within the Christian tradition, before he went rogue at Navoo and invented the temple. We've all heard the anti-Mormon claim that there is no Mormonism in the Book of Mormon. According to Spencer, however, cryptic verses following a discussion of faith and hope read, "he imparteth his word by angels unto men, yea, and not only men but women also. Now this is not all; little children..." After a tortured analysis, these verses are shown to imply genealogy and temple sealing, which are the unfolding of the missing term charity, and demonstrate that "Navoo Theology" was built upon the Book of Mormon, not a departure from it. One recalls Nibley's claim -- one he was forbidden to substantiate in print -- that the entire temple ceremony is found within the Book of Mormon.
Spencer prepares us for the negative theology of Derrida, "Alma 32:21 does not provide a positive definition of faith..." He explains, "To have faith is to be faithful to God’s word or name as it is imparted by a (true) messenger [angel, prophet, etc.]" and "hope is a question of one’s recognition of the real possibilities of the future." These are interesting definitions of faith and hope, especially when considered together, I will admit. The Derridean angle is then provided by the terms' links to the "invisible." The invisible, for Derrida, can be understood in two ways, approximating notions of kind and degree. Vocalized words are invisible because they cannot be seen (kind), and in this sense, "God" is invisible. For Spencer there is a link to faith here; presumably, God and his word are "invisible" and fidelity to the invisible, as the object of the fidelity, has no positive definition, it is intractable, as Derrida says, "God who sees the invisible and sees in my heart what I decline to have seen by my fellows". Hope, however, links to visibility by degree. In Derrida's example, a woman's nude breasts beneath her clothing, which may be revealed but presently are not, are invisible (by degree). Hope then seems to be tractable. In Derrida, I understand invisibility in degree to service invisibility in kind by contrast, and his discussion moves from God as invisible by kind to "the Other" as also invisible in this way. I feel that I grasp Spencer's Derridean exposition of faith, but I don't follow him on hope. I understand his definition of hope, but not its place in Derridean theology. I assume Spencer understands Derrida better than I do, so I'll leave that as a barrier I hit in my comprehension and not a criticism, and move on.
Spencer admits his project is ambitious. After the definitions of faith and hope in context of Derrida are provided, and some "close readings" tease "charity" out from neighboring verses, Spencer says that his speculation about the place of charity is perhaps "irresponsible", but then goes on to say, "Quite likely. But its irresponsibility must ultimately be said to be grounded in its fidelity" -- a predictable deconstructionist reversal; the possibility of logic lies in the discourse of madness etc.. In particular, Derrida plots out the "differance" between responsible and irresponsible in The Gift of Death, where irresponsibility is the marginalized term. For Spencer, this means he (Spencer) performs an "illegal" reading, and I take it that this is justification for his speculation -- "illegal" = "authentic". In the three-degrees-of-glory reading of Kierkegaard rather than the fully existential reading, the religious mode of existence is allowed to beat the system, violating the rules of the ethical. The religious life is the most authentic life for folks who read Kierkegaard this way. In my opinion, Spencer's justification for his ambitious project is more ambitious than his project is.
At any rate, the observations I made above in my comments on Faulconer's essay apply here also, Spencer is thoroughly faithful, using postmodernism to justify his faith with complex and impressive exegesis, but not to nuance it. This is why I said in the beginning the Maxwell Institute has not quite taken the postmodern turn. One wonders how acceptable this will be to outsider intellectuals. If the point of Mormon Studies is to communicate with the liberal academy and achieve recognition from them by speaking their language, they'll eventually have to really speak it.
Faith and Commodification
Robert Couch
In faith and commodification, a BYU finance professor critiques "commodified" society and religion parallel to Marxist interpretations of capitalism. Robert Couch likens personal search for God to growing and consuming one's home-grown commodities, such as produce. It's not that home-grown necessarily tastes better, but that "As we invest ourselves, a distinct desire is fostered that links us to the fruit." In a global produce market, a consumer enjoys no such link. The problem, specifically, is in being a "consumer". According to Couch, consumers of science objectify science the same way consumers of produce objectify fruits and vegetables -- a few quick Google searches and any scientific question is settled. In contrast, scientists, apparently, understand "faith", as they are forced to appreciate the trials of "nourishing the seed" and, therefore, hold the same privileged link to their theories that strawberry growers hold to their fruit. We can now anticipate the problem with theology, "As a theological system of beliefs becomes more elaborate and widely accepted, there is less and less need to pray, since the theological system can increasingly provide the answer to any question that might be posed." Much like consuming fruit from a market that offers good fruit for cheap, getting theological answers, even the right ones, eliminates the need for personal journey in one's relationship to God.
Many of Couch's points are interesting, but he takes advantage of idealized professions somewhat. The scriptures are from beginning to end, farming metaphors. Couch brings up crude oil regulations at one point, and I had to wonder, does the producer of crude enjoy his tank of gas in a way that consumers of oil do not? Do gastroenterologists have a special links to their stomachs that their patients don't? The answer is probably "yes" to both, but the profundity of such links is questionable. To me, Couch's most successful point is, "Happy homes cannot be cheaply bought and consumed." Are there objects of our desire that resist being objects, or commodities?
Whether it's strawberries, oil, or God, there seem to be many benefits to commodification. Consumers are also producers of something, and providing say, good customer service over the telephone is no less noble than growing good strawberries. One is done at the expense of the other. Further, as it would be chaotic for Americans to personally study all oil producers to gain a more thorough connection to the product they are buying rather than relying on market regulators, it would be chaotic for all Mormons to personally seek out God's attributes and broader plans for the world. Though a church built on revelation, Quinn noted that personal revelation was discouraged rather early in church history due to the arguments and confusion that resulted from contradicting revelations. It would seem that there must be a place for creeds and a repository of knowledge about God that can be consumed. There are two open questions, in my opinion: 1) Are there aspects of theology of the same kind as a "happy home" that seem to resist commodification? 2) Do Christian creeds objectify these kinds of knowledge in their creeds or discount their importance? It seems inevitable that answering these questions will bring out the debate over whether or not what we think is more important than how we live.
I think attempts to paint Mormonism as more authentic "how we live" religion than other religions, as a narrative theology vs. a systematic theology, will ultimately fail. There is likely a bell curve to the degree various religions fall into either camp, the creedal religions are unlikely all to be equally creedal. Plus, as James Faulconer has shown us, sign-seeking can be implicit. Just because a religion doesn't explicitly have a systematic theology by way of formal creeds, doesn't mean it doesn't have the same systematized structures lurking beneath the surface as the Zoromites did.
Reflections on the Maxwell Institute transition
I think Experiment on the Word has some interesting ideas, but I do not think that it is better than the traditional FARMS material. Alma 32 is one of the most philosophized chapters of the Book of Mormon, and while making for an interesting volume, I have to wonder just how many future works are viable. The material this volume covers is more than a little predictable in scope, if novel in details. I must admit that the traditional FARMS material, for whatever outrage it showed toward critics or pie-in-the-sky archeological proofs of Mormon scripture, it most definitely passed the "authenticity" test. Each volume had something unique. Volume one featured essays by dissenting members. Some book reviews in later volumes were over a hundred pages long, yet others were barely more than a scribbled note leaving one to think, "where did that come from?" Reviews of LDS board games? Right-wing condemnation of Hugh Nibley? Snooty dismissals of self-published Mormon authors? It was an unpolished work, often schizophrenic, and always outrageous and unexpected. But for all its failures, systematized theology was not one of them. The Review was what it was, and didn't care what anyone else thought.
I can't help but think the new Maxwell Institute will commoditize Mormon intellectualism as a small range of efforts fit for consumption by liberal-leaning religious studies scholars. I have a difficult time believing it will be able to hold the interest of a lay audience, but as I've written above, I also have difficulty believing that the target audience will fully appreciate what is quite obviously, an "apologetics of richness," and not an exercise to nuance the faith, as Hardy's work and Bushman's work at least sort of was. Ironically, the liberal world of Mormon Studies may find more sympathy for Mormonism if Mormon Studies scholars are allowed to be adventurous and cross real boundaries; to question their faith. If FARMS was accused of abusing the tools of science to service apologetics, the new Maxwell Institute may end up being criticized for abusing the tools of "theory" to service their parallel brand of promoting the faith. The writers here are very smart, but I just don't see the outside world buying into it.