Author: TT

From what I understand from teachers and students there, it is not an understatement to say that student evaluations are the most important factor in hiring at BYU’s religious education. Degrees and scholarship are nice, but student evaluations are king. Many a qualified young scholar has seen their hopes of teaching at BYU religion dashed by the low marks received in teaching. The overvaluation of the student evaluation leads to easier curriculum, rewards form over content, and encourages grade inflation. Stanley Fish, an influential scholar and NYT contributor on education, offers another important reason to be suspicious of student evaluations. In today’s Times, he makes the case that education, unlike a meal served in a restaurant, has a different time horizon that cannot be fully assessed at the end of a course:

Continue reading “How Students Destroyed BYU Religious Education”

The opening for the Howard W. Hunter Chair in Mormon Studies at Claremont was posted today at the American Academy of Religion (members only). Sadly, Richard L. Bushman’s temporary appointment soon comes to an end. I don’t know if it is posted at other professional organizations’ job sites, but the posting at the AAR is significant.

Let this be the place for official speculation, insider information, and discussion of the flagship Mormon Studies chair!

Mormon Scholars Testify is a new website sponsored by the folks at the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR). It solicits and posts the “views and feelings about the Gospel” from LDS scholars, including graduate students. The goal of the website is to “dispel the myth” that “people of education and learning can’t be religious.” Each page is devoted to the relatively brief testimony of a LDS scholar, and features their credentials at the bottom of the page.  One of the strengths is that it brings together a nice cross-section of scholars representing diverse ideological positions within Mormonism, from Armand Mauss to Jeff Lindsay.

The goals of this website are certainly laudable, and it is a pleasure to read the testimonies of so many LDS academics in one place.  I found many that were very interesting to read, and was of course extremely impressed by some of the academic careers of those featured there.  While I am familiar with a certain subset of LDS scholars, I was introduced to many more.  Yet, I was not entirely happy with my experience navigating around the site.

While admittedly this website is still in early stages, my initial take is that many of the testimonies featured do little to seriously treat the intellectual issues at stake. The premise of the site seems to rest on the assumption that if you can simply show that “smart people” happen to believe in the teachings of the Church, that the serious intellectual issues that people face don’t need to be dealt with directly. The solution offered to the intellectual issues is the “testimony” of the scholar, not the intellectual and philosophical work to address those issues. In my view, the “testimonies” could be strengthened by reference to further reading or discussion of some other scholars who have helped to shape the testimony that is being born (though C.S. Lewis is mentioned in eight of the testimonies!).

Continue reading “Review: Mormon Scholars Testify”

8: The Mormon Proposition is a fantastic and provocative film that I think is essential viewing for anyone interested in the subject of Mormonism and homosexuality. I see a great deal to praise in this film, not least of which bringing to the screen many powerful stories and characters. Yet, I also see much to be critical of here. The standard by which I evaluate this film is the degree to which it is able to offer a critical stance toward the Church without becoming hostile. This may or may not be the standard employed by the filmmakers, but it is for me a valuable standard in creating the conditions for progress within the LDS Church and community and improving relations with gays and lesbians. While in my view this film succeeds at one of its primary goals of humanizing the issue of same-sex marriage for an audience that may be skeptical of such a change, it does so at the cost of frequently dehumanizing Mormons.
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The notion that the family is eternal is central to modern Mormon identity. The definition of the family that has been adopted in this vision is the 20th c. nuclear family. This is in stark contrast to how some early Christians envisioned eternal earthly relationships. It was not the family that was eternal, but friendships. Interestingly, this view may have some resonance in early Mormonism as well.
Continue reading “Eternal Friendships?”

Edward Said’s monumental book Orientalism (1978) chronicled the discourse about the “Orient,” specifically Islam, that imagined it as fundamentally distinct from the “Occident.” He suggested that the various disciplines built around Orientalism as a mode of thinking, including literature, history, philology, and religious studies. He argued that the West’s ways of thinking about and depicting the East were interwined with the imperialist aims of the West to dominate, and to justify the domination of the East. This “description” of the East was based on a subtle set of prejudices and assumptions about the East, and the scholarship produced was not “pure” knowledge, but political knowledge. The caricature of the East as essentially irrational, despotic, violent, and sensual served Western political interests.
Continue reading “Mormientalism”

How do we measure our missionary work? Is it in number of invites given? Books of Mormon given? Baptisms? Changed hearts and minds? I recently had the opportunity to follow up on an experience I had sharing the Book of Mormon over a decade ago. It was embarrassing, and it reminded me of several other embarrassing efforts at sharing the Book of Mormon. Though I might have garnered praise by some measures for these “successes,” I can’t help but feel that they were ultimately counterproductive by other measures. Not only did these episodes fail to yield a baptism, I am quite sure that in the end they turned off the recipients of my sincere zeal forever.
Continue reading “Productive Missionary Work”

Tonight, Elder Oaks spoke at Harvard. Just a little more than a week after a Newsweek article accused Harvard of ignoring the importance of the academic study of religion, Elder Oaks visited Harvard Law School as part of a series of bringing high-profile LDS legal figures to speak on Mormonism 101. Such an occasion is interesting because the intended audience (though by no means the actual audience) were non-LDS, so it interesting to see how someone like Oaks packages the gospel message in such a context.
Continue reading “Oaks, Harvard, and “Religion””

It is my pleasure to introduce g. wesley as the latest guest blogger at FPR. G. wesley has been a sometime commentor and a recent friend and we are pleased to welcome welcome him to hear what he has to say.