Carton wrote:I'm sure that people like Droopy, Schryver, and Pahoran will be the first to celebrate what they will call David's "apostasy". They can't seem to tell the difference between "apostasy" and "enlightenment".
I do know question begging when I see it, however. Several years ago, I expressed open concern (on another board and here) that if David continued down the path he had, at that time, set out upon regarding his avant garde interpretations of both scripture and modern Church teaching regarding his unique preoccupation - traditional Leftist social/economic architecture with a gospel gloss - he ran the very real risk of alienating himself from the Spirit of the Lord, from the Church, and from other LDS intellectuals within the apologetic movement who did not share his LDS version of
the vision of the anointed.It does seem that this is the path he has chosen to set his feet upon, and while it is the ideologically fashionable and popular path within the realms of the humanities and social sciences in the elite chambers of contemporary academe, what it patently is not is the gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
Perhaps David now feels more at home with the "reform" Mormon culture that has coalesced around figures like Joanna Brooks, for whom the Church must meet the Great and Spacious Building halfway and acclimatize itself to critical aspects of the modern secular world.
So be it (sad as it is), but whatever road he has set out upon, yellow brick or Bifrost Bridge (as he may assume), a prerequisite for so doing is releasing one's grip upon the iron rod.
Its getting too late, as Jeffery Holland said this past conference, to take such tangential trips into the wilderness.