Reflections on the ?????Apology Letter?????

[_kairos]

Man what a slog!!

Just to get to the bottom of this, I want to know if this is the first letter or second of a two parred or just and edited version of a first letter that was not really sent? Or is a copy of a fax and the original writer's name is cut off from a cut and paste job made to look like an attached original? If anyone has F. Michael WAtson's phone number in the Cayman's I would happy to call him; rumor is he and Carla are living nicely and still Communicate with a FP fax machine!

Well it's worth a try rather than trying to guess if it is DCP in the kitchen with a laptop!

Back to the slog!!

k

[_moksha]

Re-read the letter right after re-reading Morgan Davis's. That lens should provide reliable further insight.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses and critical reading is not one of my strengths. Besides, I was joking around by imagining possible interpretations of the letter. I allow myself to be both circumspect and extreme.

[_Lemmie]

I apologize for having such a suspicious mind, and I also apologize if this seems a little obvious to those in the know, but without revealing anything inappropriate, can someone confirm that the “author“ of the letter has personally and specifically verified that they did indeed write it?

I can attest to the authenticity of the letter.

Thank you, Kishkumen.

[_Kishkumen]

Man what a slog!!

Just to get to the bottom of this, I want to know if this is the first letter or second of a two parred or just and edited version of a first letter that was not really sent? Or is a copy of a fax and the original writer's name is cut off from a cut and paste job made to look like an attached original? If anyone has F. Michael WAtson's phone number in the Cayman's I would happy to call him; rumor is he and Carla are living nicely and still Communicate with a FP fax machine!

Well it's worth a try rather than trying to guess if it is DCP in the kitchen with a laptop!

Back to the slog!!

k

LOL! Well, there was the Morgan Davis letter of 2012. That is not this letter. This letter was written in early April of 2015.

[_Lemmie]

I am going to go ahead and say that I believe the author of the letter is Kristian Heal, which, if true, definitely colors my reading of the “apology.” I have no doubt that he regrets the way things happened, but I’m also quite confident that he took/takes very serious issue with attack-minded Mopologetics. Thus, this would be a case of him trying to avoid taking any sides. Heal, along with Davis and Carl Griffin likely were the “3 Wisemen” that Midgley considers traitors.

This reminded me of something I read about FARMS and the Maxwell Institute that Hamblin wrote in a blog entry posted June 23, 2012. It seems even more relevant now. Hamblin discusses FARMS history, during which he comments on three people. It is interesting that he seems to refer to the Maxwell Institute as though it was and still is FARMS but now just has a name change; that was not my understanding, but I may not understand all the ins and outs here. Anyway, the three:

We need to understand that Bradford, even as an employee and administrative executive for the Board, was never in favor of apologetics. He consistently opposed these activities, and tried to persuade the Board to move in different directions....

Likewise Morgan Davis, was originally hired as an editor in the Mideast Translation Series, not as a director to determine scholarly policy. He was hired to execute the academic policies of the Board, not to establish those policies. Davis also never liked apologetics.

Precisely the same is the case with Kristian Heal, who was hired to supervise a Syriac digitization project; he also always disliked apologetics.

So note what has happened. We have three employees, none of whom were actively researching or publishing FARMS scholars, and all of whom disliked apologetics. Each of these three were hired to execute the policies of the Board, not to create those policies. These three have now all become “directors” of the Maxwell Institute... are now responsible to create the scholarly policy and determine the future direction for the Institute, because the Board was dissolved by the University, and power was transferred to the employees.

It’s really breathtaking how the entire nature of the Institute was turned upside down and twisted in a different direction by this phenomena. Dan Peterson was the only scholar of the original FARMS Board who was left as a “director” of the Institute; with his dismissal classic-FARMS is gone. There is not a single voice left in the leadership of the Institute to represent the original goals of classic-FARMS. This is why Dan’s dismissal and marginalization is seen as such a massive betrayal. It is the removal of the last vestige of classic-FARMS....

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/enigmatic ... lly-about/

[bolding and breaks added for ease of reading]

[_kairos]

For historical pertinence as helping to set the record on Mopologetics straight all of your thought pieces and memory recalls are of course important and I really do not mean to minimize the information being discussed here.

But there is it seems to me, some humor in all of this. I keep thinking of Mopologist Clue trying to guess the actual "villains" who did the Farmer's / Maxwell Institute in. Was it Scott Gordon in the conference room with an Iphone, or perhaps Spencer Fulhman in Samuelson's office with a letter from the Brethren or even Woody Midgely in a BYU restroom with his big boisterous mouth?

Perhaps we will never know and is that all bad?

k

[_Doctor Scratch]

Kairos: I think that the answer is: “Morgan Davis, Jerry Bradford, Kristian Heal, and Carl Griffin, in the Maxwell Institue, with the assistance of Cecil Samuelson and Jeffrey Holland.”

[_WMLdeWette]

It is interesting that he seems to refer to the Maxwell Institute as though it was and still is FARMS but now just has a name change; that was not my understanding, but I may not understand all the ins and outs here.

You are right, there is a major problem to the way that Hamblin, Midgley, and Peterson have always portrayed the importance of FARMS at the Maxwell Institute. The Maxwell Institute was at BYU prior to Hinckley's request/demand that FARMS become a part of it. The Maxwell Institute has always been a collection of different projects and organizations, and FARMS was only one of those. FARMS did not change its name to the Maxwell Institute and FARMS was never 100% the Maxwell Institute. Most of what FARMS itself was doing was brought in under the Willes Center at the Maxwell Institute, and METI was a project that Peterson was working on at BYU (so not technically FARMS). So, in other words, you are right.

[Guest]

You are right, there is a major problem to the way that Hamblin, Midgley, and Peterson have always portrayed the importance of FARMS at the Maxwell Institute. The Maxwell Institute was at BYU prior to Hinckley's request/demand that FARMS become a part of it. The Maxwell Institute has always been a collection of different projects and organizations, and FARMS was only one of those. FARMS did not change its name to the Maxwell Institute and FARMS was never 100% the Maxwell Institute. Most of what FARMS itself was doing was brought in under the Willes Center at the Maxwell Institute, and METI was a project that Peterson was working on at BYU (so not technically FARMS). So, in other words, you are right.

I'm not sure that is correct. My understanding (confirmed by Wikipedia, so take it for it's worth) is that the Maxwell Institute was not established until 2006, enveloping FARMS and ISPART (Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts). The latter was formed only in 2001 from CPART (the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts), which was formed in 1997, but FARMS also joined BYU in 1997. As CPART involved most of the same people, the FARMS crew certainly had had an institutional foothold for at least as long as CPART and in any case long before the Maxwell Institute.

FARMS used to have an office on the southern slope of campus, in fact, marked, quite explicitly, with logo and all: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. There was also Bayt al-Hikma, in that little house on the northern part of campus near the stadium, where some few were occasionally engaged on METI (Middle Eastern Texts Initiative), but there was no Maxwell Institute. As far as I know, METI was the oldest part of this (initiated in the early 1990s), but Daniel Peterson was its editor and had been instrumental in that project since the beginning, as well as in FARMS. METI was absorbed by ISPART when it was formed in the early 2000s, but METI was not an institute or anything of that sort; it was a project. Everything was absorbed by the Maxwell Institute on its formation in 2006, but FARMS certainly was the oldest institution at that time, and the Willes Book of Mormon center or whatever it's called wasn't formed until 2007, after the Maxwell Institute.

So my timeline is:

1992-ish: METI
1997: FARMS (with a preexistent life going back to 1986 or so)
1997: CPART
2001: ISPART (the new CPART, which took over METI)
2006: Maxwell Institute (FARMS + ISPART)

Given that all of these projects essentially involved FARMS people, especially in 1990s, I think one can be forgiven for seeing the importance of FARMS in all of these. I doubt there would have even been a Maxwell Institute if there hadn't first been FARMS, and I really wonder how there would have been CPART/ISPART without the scholarly network built by the FARMS crowd (for a long time, they were the same people doing all of it). Indeed, even before it joined BYU, FARMS and FARMS associates were sponsoring conferences and work that was not apologetic (e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls), indicative of larger designs. It seems obvious to me that CPART (later ISPART) was an outgrowth of FARMS, a secular sibling, as was METI to some extent.

Perhaps you are thinking of the Religious Studies Center (earlier, the Center for Religious Studies)? That was formed in 1975, so a decade or more before FARMS, but it has always been and remains a separate entity from the the Maxwell Institute.

Davis was part of METI, Heal came much later, but even Bradford had been part of FARMS. All the brighter names we know and love had been there for some time. It certainly seems to me that the lines between FARMS and CPART/ISPART and METI were sufficiently thin that it was only understandable that the FARMSians would have difficulty seeing the line between FARMS and the Maxwell Institute when it was birthed. I was only an observer, and hardly a sympathetic one, but I could see no such lines at the time, indeed not until the early 2010s really.

I think there were at least two conflicting lines, both of which grew out of FARMS.

1. On the one hand, the Peterson Strand: it looked to me like the creation of the Maxwell Institute was simply a way for FARMS to consolidate its dominance over subsidiary projects that were derived from it in the first place, and to shore up the institutional prestige on campus through the imprimatur of the president of BYU no less than the memory of an apostle. ISPART and METI were academically more legitimate than FARMS, but housing them all in the Maxwell Institute erased that line as well, thus allowing some of that legitimacy to spill onto the apologetic work—at least, that is what I think the attempt was. This brand of FARMSian was exclusive and favored overt apologetics.

2. On the other hand, the Bradford Strand: in the pre-Maxwell Institute days, I once had a conversation with some evangelicals who were doing some text-critical work with ISPART on some New Testament thing or other for a few months (maybe some kind of fellowship; I didn't ask), but they had to spend a lot of time at the FARMS building for some reason that was not clear to me. They found in me a sympathetic ear to some of their discomfort; it was clearly unpleasant for them to associate with a place that they viewed (rightly) as hostile on some level. Now, something like the Maxwell Institute alleviated that by blurring these boundaries. Maybe Peterson was the anti-evangelical editor of the Review on Thursday (or whatever day), but on Monday (or whatever day) he could be the METI guy. There was, in short, enough scholarly furniture as the Maxwell Institute that it made it easier to be both an apologist and a textual critic, or one or the other. This brand of FARMSian was inclusive and favored covert apologetics.

The second strand has obviously won, but now doesn't seem to have any FARMS people associated with it (although it is interesting to note that there are some scholars at BYU who published or worked with FARMS in the 1990s and with the Maxwell Institute in the 2000s but yet have yet to publish/blog with the Interpreter, lending some credence to my claim that there was at least a second, less vocal and less polemical strain of FARMSian). I would not have thought it would dominate and was not even aware of this second strain before the early 2000s, and I doubt very many people were either, so I don't want to rewrite a Whiggish history from the victor's citadel overlooking the gallows where their enemies hang.

Forgive me for my errors, and correct me where I'm wrong.

[_consiglieri]

Kairos: I think that the answer is: “Morgan Davis, Jerry Bradford, Kristian Heal, and Carl Griffin, in the Maxwell Institue, with the assistance of Cecil Samuelson and Jeffrey Holland.”

Now that you mention it, there does seem to be an aversion to blaming the people who are obviously responsible for the ouster.

Or are we to think this was done by a rogue middle-management without the sanction, blessing, and direction of the Lord's anointed?