Nice Review of BYU Near Eastern Volume

[_silentkid]

Besides this ongoing project, is there any other program at BYU that is considered, worldwide, to be the cutting-edge?

When I was at BYU, Dr. Whiting was overseeing one of the most comprehensive phylogenies ever constructed. One of Dr. Crandall's graduate students wrote a computer program for maximum likelihood studies that is cited in just about every phylogenetic paper I've read. I know it's a pretty specific scientific field, but it's one in which BYU is definitely well-known, respected, and cutting-edge.

[_silentkid]

So in an academic sense, unless your degree was in Mormon Studies or whatever, the education at BYU is about as good as one would expect at any similarly large* and funded university, staffed with well-meaning professors - and better than some, I'm sure.

Amen!!

[_Joey]

Good to see that Provo guys get reviewed and noticed for works on people, places and things that actually exist(ed).

Should we infer from your self promoting that BYU's publications in these subject matters are the only ones receiving accolades?

Is there update on the chances of BYU faculty publications on the "Book of Mormon historicity" receiving any interest from these same academic groups? Or are you still pandering and trying to "coat-tail" these works as legitimate to the ignorant members on message boards?

Pure granstanding again!!

[_Daniel Peterson]

It's your bedtime, Joey.

[_Joey]

It's your bedtime, Joey.

Its everyones bedtime after reading Clark&Sorenson. Or after listening to you trying to sell their Book of Mormon historicity works -- zzzzzzz!

A new "over-the-counter" generic chloraform issued by FARMS!!!!

[_John Larsen]

I studied a lot in three different colleges, or departments, at BYU. They were the Physics department, the Computer Science department, and the German department. None of the stuff I ever did in any of those three departments related to the church, religion, God, Mormonism, or anything like unto it in any way, shape, or form, except that one Physics teacher introduced himself as a non-Mormon and reassured the class that he already owned several copies of the Book of Mormon and didn't need any more (LOL).

Sure, the beard card testing center nonsense, and some other nonsense related to offcampus housing, and the weekly shutdown of the campus so people would go to the devotionals, and the whole ecclesiastical endorsement thing was all obviously geared toward keeping students in the church. But the actual academic material from those departments outside of, say, the Religion department, or now the Maxwell Institute, seemed pretty secular and free from much if any Mormon-specific content. So in an academic sense, unless your degree was in Mormon Studies or whatever, the education at BYU is about as good as one would expect at any similarly large* and funded university, staffed with well-meaning professors - and better than some, I'm sure.

*also keep in mind that there really aren't any similarly large private universities - I think BYU is the largest privately funded university in existence

I would tend to agree. It is largely BYU's lack of Grad students that makes it an inferior research institution.

[_Joey]

Back in the early 80's when I lived in SLC working at one of the then "Big-8" firms I spent many a day recruiting at BYU for about 4 years.

I would say their acctg grads were technically as good as many other schools around the country. The real premium of hiring a BYU grad was there need to work. Most came out w a wife and family already and the big firms all knew they could get them to work the busy season late hours because they needed the Old Testament and coinage to support a family at such an early age. In my experience, they were very good technically but not too strong on the social skills. So getting them in SLC was a no brainer.

Recruiting them for non-LDS clients outside of Utah was a much bigger gamble. Once we moved them out of Utah, we knew they would feel like fish out of water and inevitably the wife would want to move back to Mecca. For the greate majority, they simply did not have the social skills and/or tolerance to deal with the real world. I think that has changed much now.

BYU does have any greater academic provenance than most private schools. But the professional workplace still beleives these young Mormon men will work harder than most because they simply cannot enjoy the financial freedom that their "usually" single and more socially adaptable peers do. Its just a great worker bee hire from an employers perspective. Ironically however, outside of the cooridor, it will be those who have the greater social skills that succeed much faster.

BYU is a fine school. It just fails miserably when it tries to make fictional history legitimate! The works of Clark n Sorenson on the people places and cultures in the Book of Mormon continued to be laughable. And overall that is the kind of perception that hurts Mormon grads from BYU trying to work outside the corridor.

[_Sethbag]

I'm going to bet that it's the Mormonism itself, rather than the works of Clark and Sorensen, that influence the perception of BYU grads outside of the Morridor. I doubt very many people outside of apologetic circles (pro and con) know that Clark and Sorensen's Book of Mormon apologetics exist.

[_Daniel Peterson]

The book's cover:



Sebastian Brock, recently retired from the University of Oxford, is by common consent the foremost student of Syriac Christianity in the English-speaking world. George Kiraz, his M.A. student at Oxford and a native speaker of Syriac as well as of Arabic, proceeded to earn a doctorate in computer science from the University of Cambridge and is now at the forefront of efforts to make the Syriac literary heritage accessible in good printed and electronic editions.

Incidentally, Dr. Kiraz runs Gorgias Press, which published Eugene Seaich's A Great Mystery: The Secret of the Jerusalem Temple: The Embracing Cherubim and At-One-Ment with the Divine. He is, yes, a friend of mine, and he is the one who (as the intrepid Scratch has revealed) gave me the corrupt Mopologetic 50% discount on Dr. Seaich's posthumously published volume -- which happens to have been identical to the 50% discount given to all attendees at that academic conference in Boston last November.

[_solomarineris]

What is it?

Just from my own little academic neighborhood, I would say that our Dead Sea Scrolls database project, our searchable electronic edition of the Popul Vuh, our electronic publication of materials from the Vatican Apostolic Library, our documentary film about the ancient Arabian frankincense trail, our work recovering damaged papyrus texts from the ruins of Herculaneum, and other such projects are all pretty cutting edge and world class, as is Dan Graham's work on Aristotle and the Pre-Socratics. As is Bill Hamblin's work on ancient Near Eastern warfare. As is John Gee's work on ancient Egyptian hypocephali. So is my colleague Kirk Belnap's founding and direction of the National Middle East Languages Resource Center. So is my colleague Dana Bourgerie's founding and direction of the China Flagship Program. So is my colleague Dil Parkinson's work on Arabic lexicography.
And those are just a few items essentially from my academic backyard. There are plenty of others. I didn't mention, for example, the fact that Dana Pike, Andrew Skinner, David Seeley, and Donald Parry are active members of the international Dead Sea Scrolls editorial team.
If you want me to start listing things from other colleges and departments at BYU, though, you're going to have to pay me by the hour.

Must be indeed very nice & rewarding to contribute into real History, Linguistics of the Planet,
which is incidentally called Earth.