Daniel Peterson wrote:A word about quantities, though: I’ve seen some online discussion of the budget of the Maxwell Institute. Some, on the basis of no information or of flatly false information, have claimed that it was in the multimillions of dollars annually. This is not true, and never was. But there has, in fact, been talk of millions of dollars donated to the Maxwell Institute, and such donations have, in fact, been given. This, however, is what needs to be understood: Those were donations, by and large, to the Maxwell Institute’s endowment. And the Maxwell Institute, as part of Brigham Young University, has followed the University’s rather conservative policy for the use of that endowment — after all, the University manages the Institute’s endowment — which permits 5% of an endowment’s value to be drawn off each year. (This allows for regular and predictable budget planning. In a good year, any proceeds in excess of 5% are placed right back into the endowment account as an addition to principle; in a bad year, so far as possible, 5% is still permitted to be used for yearly expenses.) Thus, while a million dollars, say, sounds like — and, of course, is — a considerable amount, an endowment of one million dollars only produces $50,000 in useable revenue per annum. That’s very useful, but it’s not really an overwhelming volume of cash.
A few hostile outsiders have imagined me and my former colleagues at the Maxwell Institute living lives of sybaritic ease atop piles of millions of dollars in gold, but this is completely wrong (to say nothing of silly): The Maxwell Institute, at least in its heyday, was publishing two semi-annual journals and an annual journal, as well as a variable number of books (including not only such wonderful but expensive tomes as Royal Skousen’s series regarding the textual history of the Book of Mormon but, also, the volumes of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative). It was and is its own publishing company, retaining a staff of professional editors. It was sponsoring conferences and lectures, producing films (most of them Mormon-related but some of them not), and engaging in a number of other activities, very commonly not LDS-related, such as the production of a Dead Sea Scrolls database and digitally recovering ancient texts from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Moreover, although most of its work was done, at least in the old days, by people employed elsewhere, the Maxwell Institute (formerly FARMS) has long employed and supported a few people — John Gee provides an excellent example — whose work and publications were by no means limited only to Latter-day Saint venues. (For an example of Dr. Gee’s non-LDS-related work that appeared only yesterday, see this.)
Thus, to compare the supposedly vast wealth of the Maxwell Institute to a barely-funded little Mom-and-Pop anti-Mormon Christian ministry, as some have been doing, is misleading at best.
When did anyone ever seriously accuse Peterson et al. of living a life of sybaritic ease? First, you would have to have some real money. Secondly, you would have to have some actual fun.
The argument was always about whether he was a paid apologist. That has been a settled issue for me for quite some time now.
Daniel Peterson wrote:Finally, I’ve seen a couple of discussions about our motivation in calling our new venture Mormon Interpreter. Why, some have wondered, did we choose that title? The consensus view, at least among our critics, appears to be that we chose it as a pathetically childish or, more charitably, as a cheeky and defiant jab at the Maxwell Institute. This way, you see, both are referred to as MI. (Get it?)
A plausible explanation. Except for the facts. First of all, I don’t recall anybody affiliated with the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship ever calling it MI. If anybody did, I don’t remember it. I certainly didn’t do so. To me, it was and is (as above) either the Maxwell Institute or, simply, the Institute.
More fundamentally, though, we don’t call our effort Mormon Interpreter. The journal is called Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture. And the journal is sponsored by The Interpreter Foundation. It’s pretty hard to get the initials MI out of either of those. (Our URL includes the phrase “Mormon Interpreter,” but that was just a late suggestion from our technical guru, because there are lots of other “interpreters” out there on the web.)
I guess we'll have to ignore the many times it has been called Mormon Interpreter because the website now uses Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture. Anyway, I distinctly recall it being Mormon Interpreter in the early days of the website. In any case, no one would ever accuse these punsters and acronym artists of doing something as clever as using MI for their own purposes surely.
More importantly---meh.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist