Part 1: The L-Skinny is Far, Far Greater....

[_Daniel Peterson]

That's it?????

The creepy "Agent S" has managed to call your attention to some previously published essays (if not, merely, to some selected snippets from previously published essays)?

Truly a watershed moment in the history of Mopologetics: Scartch is helped by one of his creepy network of anonymous "informants" to stumble across some long-published essays that have been on line for years.


I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[_moksha]

Alright Dr. Peterson! Do you have any other passages from Burnt Norton or any other of the Four Quartets? The Hollow Men! The Stuffed Men!

[_gramps]

For a critique of the New Mormon History, including Clayton's approach, see David E. Bohn, No Higher Ground.

Criticisms weren't only offered by FARMS.

Ray, this link didn't work for me. Is it working for others?

[_CaliforniaKid]

That's it?????

The creepy "Agent S" has managed to call your attention to some previously published essays (if not, merely, to some selected snippets from previously published essays)?

The letter is not identical to the essay, although most of its content did end up embedded in the essay. The letter was addressed to Boyd K. Packer personally in 1981. The essay was published in 1982. I think that making the typescript of this letter publicly available is a useful service to historians, even if the published essay must remain, both in polish and in historical impact, the more important document. If nothing else, it demonstrates that Clayton made a careful, private, and relatively inoffensive personal appeal to BKP before coming out and publicly denouncing Boyd's talk and its implications for the study of Mormon history.

Incidentally, a hard-copy of this letter is available in the University of Utah special collections. I wish that more archival material like this would go online, so that broke college students like myself wouldn't have to travel the world to get access to it all.

Best,

-Chris

[_Daniel Peterson]

It's rhetorically interesting, CK, that the two players in your post above are "Clayton" and "Boyd."

[_harmony]

It's rhetorically interesting, CK, that the two players in your post above are "Clayton" and "Boyd."

I think you're reading something into his post that isn't there.

[_Daniel Peterson]

I think you're reading something into his post that isn't there.

Perhaps it's you reading something into my post that isn't there.

But feminists, surely, have sensitized us to the power- and status-rhetoric of situations where, for example, in a corporate office, the men are known by their last names and the women by their first names.

(Perhaps CK is an intimate personal friend of President Packer's. I acknowledge that as a possibility.)

[_harmony]

I think you're reading something into his post that isn't there.

Perhaps it's you reading something into my post that isn't there.

And what is that? Especially given the rest of your reply?

[_Mister Scratch]

Clayton's essay "Does History Undermine Faith?", is, and has been available available online for a while: https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/issues/032.pdf (This is a pdf and may take a while to download.)

Another good essay in this one is Sterling Mc Murrin's "Religion and the Denial of History".


Dialogue had a greater range of debates (in the early 1980s) about what was then called the "New Mormon History".

Like Gramps, I also tried to access this via that very same link, but it was unavailable.

[_Daniel Peterson]

And what is that? Especially given the rest of your reply?

The fact is that I hadn't said anything about the content or implications of CK's post when you responded, except that his choice of names was "rhetorically interesting."

Now, I realize that paying attention to actual texts and actually knowing people isn't required, on this very strange message board, for one to discourse learnedly on the nature of those texts and the character of those people, so perhaps I should just drop the elementary point -- obvious in most other worlds -- that if a text doesn't say x, the text doesn't say x. Who cares?