The bottom line to all this (if there is any at all), is, at the end of the day, that the "NOMs" have colonized NAMI and had their way. "Apologetics," that intellectually embarrassing and academically eyeball-rolling enterprise in which deeply educated, intelligent and faithful Latter-day-Saint intellectuals presume to support and defend the gospel of Jesus Christ using the tools, methods, and language of classic liberal arts scholarship and discourse, has had to make way for the real article.
Some, having tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Life and then, having looked around and seen the pointing fingers of mockery in the Great and Spacious Building, have come to feel a bit ashamed of their condition and have decided that, to do any kind of serious scholarship at all, one's own core values, worldview and, if Bradford is to be believed, even one's testimony, to the extent that one's testimony involves absolute, direct, conclusive knowledge regarding a body of fundamental realities about the universe and that this might prevent realization of Bradford's central idea that, to study the religion of others, one must pretend that one's own religious conceptions are only one relative perspective among a multitude of relative perspectives, must be continually "bracketed," or placed in an intellectual compartment from which it cannot dilute or pollute one's "entry into," not just the ideas and context of, but the lives, experiences, and perceptions of those of other religious traditions.
That this is nonsense in a philosophical sense, or is in any way actually required for a Latter-day-Saint to study, say, Buddhism, doesn't take a great deal of penetrative analysis.
The postmodernish, epistemologically (if not philosophically) relativist assumptions behind his philosophy of scholarship approach is made apparent in his own writings:
Religious traditions differ significantly in terms of how their adherents view the world and what they take to be sacred. They also differ on the meaning of important notions such as "history" and "time" and consequently on how questions of meaning and truth are settled. They even differ on what it means to be religious.
Thus in order to properly describe and explain a tradition, students need to gain insight into and an appreciation for the way of life of its adherents. To do this, they need to cultivate a particular approach, one that requires them to bracket or suspend, as much as possible, their own beliefs and values (particularly ones that might either endorse or come into conflict with what it is they are trying to understand). In addition, they should try sympathetically and imaginatively to enter into the lives and experiences of those they are studying. By employing informed empathy, they can gain some access into the complex of intentions and experiences of religious adherents. Finally, students should seek to portray accurately the rich array of ritual practices, symbols, experiences, and beliefs they observe from this insider perspective.
Students also need to be sensitive to ways in which the academic study of religion itself, one that proceeds for the most part along a well-established Western, post-Enlightenment path, may at times get in the way of their fully grasping what it is that others are doing and how they experience and act in the world.
The reason behind trying to internalize a religious tradition's worldview is not sentiment, nor is it an attempt simply to be neutral. Rather, it is to get at the ways things are, to get at the facts, which include importantly the way religious followers feel and think about the world. What is being emphasized here lies at the heart of religious studies, methodologically speaking. It is a technique long known and practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other students of the human experience.
1. The task he has set here is, for the most part, impossible, from a psychological and cultural perspective. We can study, learn, and attempt to comprehend the perspectives, worldviews, perceptions, and filters through which various peoples view the world, but this is distinctly limited and attenuated by the very real fact that, to a great degree, unless we have been born into, enculurated within, and socialized by a particular culture, we can never "enter into" the lives and experiences of people from those cultures to the idealistic and wholly, for the purposes of serious scholarship, unnecessary degree which Bradford claims is necessary and desirable.
2. The idea of westerners and Americans (and many other contemporary students of history and culture across various nations and peoples) and in particular, LDS, as a precondition of serious study and learning, having to "sympathetically and imaginatively" enter into "the lives and experiences of those they are studying" when studying the ancient Samurai, Mongol culture, Viking society, Islamic fundamentalism, Nazi society in the 1930s, modern neo-pagans or Wiccans, the Aztecs or ancient Amerindian cultures, or ancient Egyptian religion, or that LDS scholars must "bracket" (i.e., pretend that the gospel and/or other core values and foundational assumptions from one's own cultural/philosophical environment are not true or are not known, for the purposes of one's scholarly study, to be true, and that one's own perspective is only one relative, perhaps arbitrary perspective among a plethora of equally relative and arbitrary alternatives) their own knowledge and experience of the gospel and somehow meld psychically, sympathetically (a very dangerous notion, from an intellectual, psychological, and spiritual standpoint, in my estimation), and empathically with the perceptions, worldviews, experiences, feelings, cultural prisms, and psychological states of those they study is, on the face of it, preposterous as an epistemic and methodological template for understanding the nature and limitations of scholarship, but just as likely to throw up imposing walls to both real understanding of alien cultures and traditions as to tear them down, and brings with it the risk of philosophical, moral, and spiritual neutering of our internalization of and clear bias towards the principles of the gospel relative to other values and philosophies and which generations of prophets have clearly stated are the frame of reference for all other truth claims, of whatever kind.
3. This philosophy of scholarly study masks another project and intellectual orientation, which, to put it bluntly, is simply to secularize, intellectually neutralize, and domesticate gospel teachings and truth claims relative to the surrounding culture such that they do not stand out with such clarity and sharpness against the background of the dominant secularist/humanist/naturalist "liberal" cultural milieu, and particularly among the academic intelligentsia.
In other words, Gerald Bradford and his new coterie of postmodern scholar-psychologist-empaths are are embarrassed by and uncomfortable around traditional apololgists, and aren't particularly interested in or respectful of what they do.
They've made that fairly clear, no?