Trevor wrote:Then, I would say that it is technically you are employed by the LDS Church, at least in part, for your contributions to apologetic scholarship. I don't think this is a big deal, but it is more significant than pocket change.
You've read that article on exemplar historiography in BYU Studies and concluded that it's an apologetic piece?
You appear to be conflating Mormon-related and apologetic. The two are not synonymous. I've written a number of Mormon-related pieces -- including articles in enyclopedias, book reviews, etc. -- that only an antishock8 (see below) could possibly view as "apologetic."
Trevor wrote:You have indicated that you did include your apologetic efforts in two categories of "citizenship" and "scholarship." The citizenship part is also interesting, because the inclusion of your apologetic efforts there likely indicates the degree to which the LDS Church has incorporated apologetics into its premiere academic institution. If it didn't fit, you would not put it there.
I also included service in a bishopric, etc. It's a way of indicating what one does with one's time when one is not teaching, preparing for teaching, grading, researching, and writing.
I suppose that it will now be said that I've been paid for holding a church calling. Yet, had I not been called to that position, I almost certainly would have received the same rank advancements and the same salary increases -- unless, in fact, my not having spent many hours per week on bishopric duties had allowed me (as it might well have) to achieve faster advancement and greater salary increases because I was able to research and write more.
Trevor wrote:Apologetic work is a significant part of your academic career and a substantive part of your job at BYU. You are a paid teacher, scholar, and apologist. And, I would probably weigh the roles in that order (first being most important), but that's just my guess.
Yet the University has never asked me to write anything apologetic, and I've been faulted on several occasions for having done so. And there is no reason to believe that, had any and all Mormon-related writing disappeared entirely from my resumé, my rank and salary would be any less than they are now. In fact, my salary might, very possibly, have been somewhat higher.
You left out administrator. I have, to my great distress, spent perfectly enormous amounts of time on administrative matters over the past ten or twelve years.
antishock8 wrote:Mr. Peterson euphemistically calls himself a historian rather than an apologist. Whatever gets you to sleep at night my friend...
If antishock8, based upon his close inspection of my work on the ten separated intellects in the cosmology of Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, the Physics of Ibn Sina, the biography of Muhammad, al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, the A‘lam al-Nubuwwa of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the Medical Aphorisms of Moses Maimonides, Ibn Rushd's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, etc., wants to label it all Mormon apologetics, that's his weirdly eccentric privilege.
harmony wrote:So BYU has asked you to not engage in apologetics, and you do it anyway?
No. The University as such has told me nothing, one way or the other. I was advised by well-meaning colleagues at the time of my hiring to stay away from Mormon topics, have been told similar things by well-meaning colleagues since, and have been criticized by one department administrator for having written on Mormon topics. For two or three years, in fact, his views on the matter probably had a negative impact on my annual salary increase -- which will affect my salary for the remainder of my career. I disagreed with him, and I declined to comply with his preferences. This is largely a matter of administrator autonomy. I have one close colleague and friend (in another BYU college) whose salary and rank advancement have been much more negatively affected than mine because of his writing on Mormon topics, even though his non-Mormon publication record is extremely, unusually, good. Writing on Mormonism not only didn't help him; it hurt him. He was penalized for it, and was explicitly told that he was being penalized, and has for a number of years now avoided further Mormon-related writing. That is, from what I can tell, par for the course in that particular college; fortunately, my college hasn't been so draconian about the matter. Still, while I can't guarantee that my own writing on Mormonism has ever helped me, salary-wise, I'm reasonably sure that it has hurt me. Fortunately, though, the damage hasn't been catastrophic.
harmony wrote:(And I'm beginning to tire of being asked to justify my career, my paycheck, etc., to strangers on a message board.)
There's a simple solution to that: avoid making statements about your career, your various paychecks, etc. on the boards. Avoiding making such statements on an individual board, such as this one, won't suffice, since your posts on one board will get quoted on another board quite often. So... avoid posts about your career (degree, responsibilities, tasks, etc), your paychecks (source, amount, expenditures attached thereto, etc) on every board, and no doubt the need to justify both or either will disappear.
Right. Refuse to answer questions, thus subjecting myself to endless accusations of having something to hide, and let the Scratches of the world continue to spread falsehoods. Consider, for example, this specimen, from 15 March:
Mister Scratch wrote:I'm quite curious as to the actual amount DCP and others have "raked in." I wouldn't be surprised if DCP's tally extends into the mid-six figures.
What nonsense.
I don't bring this topic up.
Well, I'm done. I need to do some more editing on a tenth-century Arabic Mopologetic text, etc. I knew it was a foregone conclusion that I would be simplistically revealed as a paid Mopologist hack, doing the bidding of the Morg for $$$, no matter what I said. I'm done with this month's Scratchoscopy.