Narratives wield a power measured not in historical accuracy but in effect on the reader. In many cases, the values expressed in a narrative, and especially the way that narrative moves us to thought and action, outranks the relationship of that narrative to history. In fiction, truths such as love, loyalty, following principles and defending freedoms shine even more clearly as they are unencumbered by the complexities of reality. But when we are reading Lord of the Rings, we know that we are reading fiction. We don’t expect the accounts to match up to history. What about scriptural accounts, where in many cases the accounts did not literally happen, were not intended as historical truth, but where readers are deeply invested in current literal interpretation? Read more »
We’d like to welcome Enoch as our latest guest blogger! Enoch holds and/or is working on degrees in biblical studies and is interested in issues about revelation and epistemology. Please join us in offering a hearty welcome!
A student in your Political Philosophy course asked that these comments be forwarded to you since they could not fit in the comment box available on the Student Ratings survey:
This is from a student in my Political Science 309r: Special Topics in Political Philosophy. The special topic was “Social Justice.” No, this was not a response to Glenn Beck. His comments came out a couple months into the term and about 7 months after the topic had been chosen. The primary focus of the class had been, of course, John Rawls and contemporary writings about social justice. I was going to comment on the comment…but it is beautiful all by itself (I have only edited out my full last name).
For the rest of my life, I will be grateful to Professor H for teaching me about the most powerful tools a political philosopher can use—smugness and sarcasm. Professor H taught by example, as well as by word. Dismissive snickering is far more effective than actual argument, as was vividly proven by the performances and demonstrations he integrated into his lectures.
Yes, Professor H. enjoys an abundance of excellent qualities as a teacher—his rather astonishing ability to understand texts he has never read; his pious refusal to argue (so difficult in a political science class); his ability to unite the class as a single, sulky, homogonous body of dissatisfied aristocrats (by applying the snicker method to any student who tried, however feebly or briefly, to defend—or discuss—property rights. Eventually such students were alienated, shunted into a corner of the room where they were remembered only when ridiculing them could further the day’s lecture. After a few months, they took to whimpering and shaking, groaning and rocking like Elantris’ Hoed, ravaged beyond sanity by the disease of having disagreed with the professor).
Yes, all of these are desirable qualities, and we enjoyed Prof. H’s abundance in them just as he did. Nevertheless, Professor H. is not without his flaws. The flaw that bothered me the most was the ease with which he dismissed the notion that God allows evil to exist in the universe as a way to test us, and the following notion that life is about choosing one’s own destiny. Certainly, I would never say that because God is in control we shouldn’t strive for justice on earth. This class was bafflingly unconcerned with justice—apparently slapping the word “social” on to “justice” stops justice from being an eternal good. The course proceeded as follows:
Professor H. presented the class with a problem: namely, that the world is an unjust place. Then he presented us with a solution: namely, that justice can only be achieved when a giant global government rises up, deprives everyone of everything, and dispenses resources among mankind according to the dictates of its awful omniscience. Then the professor retreated into the corner with the Hoed to lament the fact that this giant world totalitarianism seems unlikely to arise. Read more »
Next up, and perhaps the last for a while, is Taylor P.
He writes:
I received a ThD in New Testament and Early Christianity from a divinity school that works within a “religious studies” paradigm. I have been hired in a tenure-track position in a Religious Studies department at a private, secular, liberal arts college. The year that I went out on the market, there were two jobs in my immediate field at secular schools, and three at religiously-affiliated schools. I applied to those and a few more that were focused more broadly (e.g., anyone in “Christian Studies”), but overall it was a pretty terrible year and I am incredibly fortunate to have landed the job that I did. One thing that I will say is that there is no “formula” for securing a job. There are many different ways. I will sketch out my own experience and share the advice that I received and that seemed to work in my case. To any who are involved in this process, I wish you the best of luck! Read more »
Most of my advisors tell me something to the effect that they don’t know any PhD grad who doesn’t get 5 years out and hate their dissertation, think the opposite of what they wrote, etc. In BYU Religious Education, this takes an interesting form. While it is true that there is a major concern on the part of those who are thinking about a job in RelEd over whether they will lose all touch with their field, research agenda, etc., there is also an explicit attitude expressed by members of the search committees with regard to the influence of the PhD experience. I have heard from more than one source that people on the hiring committees routinely ask something like the following of potential candidates coming out of PhD programs (i.e., non-CES-track hires): “Robert J. Matthews [of blessed memory] used to say that it takes seven years for people to get the PhD out of their system. What do you think he meant by that?”
For me, the major difference between my advisors’ statements about the degree/my own feelings about it, and what I’ve heard from my sources about certain BYU RelEd faculty, is the overt pathological language: While I might think that the PhD is a stepping stone, an activity wherein the process is the important thing and not necessarily the finished product, the BYU RelEd attitude seems to be that the PhD is something you “recover from” or “get over” as you would a serious illness. It is like Chemotherapy: necessary but sickening nearly to death. Or, alternatively, it is a result of substance abuse: After the PhD you have to sober up from Dissertating Under the Influence. Serious counseling and behavior modification is necessary if the victim is to be fully integrated into healthy, normal society.
In Plato’s dialogue Crito, Socrates tells his friend Crito that he cannot flee his death sentence and impose upon himself exile. He is an Athenian and everything he has become, all the things that make him Socrates, are the result of Athenian culture and Athenian institutions.
I sometimes feel similarly towards the University of Utah.
My time at the University of Utah was a struggle. Long commutes. Financial struggles. I was not a favorite of the faculty. By having kids and a wife who worked, my commitment to the scholarly pursuit was often questioned.
I am a Ute officially because I got two degrees there, my BA and MA. Both are in political science. I actually never lived on campus or even in Salt Lake County, but I spent about 5 years there as a student. It was there as a junior that I fell in love with political theory. It was during my senior year that I took a class focusing on John Rawls.
My understanding of Rawls was greatly expanded while taking graduate seminars in the philosophy department. It was while listening to a public lecture by Utah philosopher Bruce Landesman on John Rawls that I decided to focus my studies on Rawls. That lecture was 11 years ago.
This last school year, I had the privilege of teaching political philosophy and American Heritage at BYU (after teaching similar courses for three years at BYU-Idaho). In addition to my teaching during this last year, I had a number of opportunities to participate in conferences dealing with Mormonism, Religion, and public affairs.
While these meetings and discussions at BYU have been a lot of fun, they have also reinforced two things. First…boy am I a liberal. This was my first heavy dose of conservative academia. Having been trained in the liberal egalitarian school, I was for the first time surrounded by Straussians and religious conservatives. While I expect this in most LDS settings, my department in Rexburg was quite moderate in terms of politics. This moderation was also found in the political science department at BYU, but these conferences had a considerable conservative, though still very intellectual, bent. Second, I am a secular thinker when it comes to politics. My attempt to form a religious argument for egalitarianism has become a secular critique of religious themes. Read more »
*As will soon become apparent, I have been influenced by several posts of late. You might consider this a longish comment.
In a routine meeting, I recently heard a department chair of religious studies describe the relationship he has with his own religious tradition as tortured. He went on to say that the tension between faith and scholarship is essential to what religious studies people do. Instead of seeking a once-and-for-all resolution or peace of mind, as some might like to have, he recommended that his audience just accept the tension and learn to put it to use. It offers a lot of creative potential and leads you to ask really difficult and interesting questions, questions that no one else would ask, he said. Without it, “you’re just an historian.” Read more »
So you managed to get into a graduate program. Now what? As a continuation of the Tips on applying series, we’re asking recent PhDs and ThDs in religion and related disciplines to share their experience in preparing for and succesfully making the transition from student to faculty. We’ve posed a few questions, and you may have some of your own to ask. Perhaps our respondants will hang around to reply. No promises, though.
First up, Lincoln Blumell’s advice to LDS Graduate Students in Biblical Studies and cognate fields is as follows: Read more »
There’s no bread, let them eat cake
There’s no end to what they’ll take
Flaunt the fruits of noble birth
Wash the salt into the earth
But they’re marching to Bastille Day
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Free the dungeons of the innocent
The king will kneel and let his kingdom rise
Bloodstained velvet, dirty lace
Naked fear on every face
See them bow their heads to die
As we would bow as they rode by
And we’re marching to Bastille Day
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Sing, oh choirs of cacophony
The king has kneeled, to let his kingdom rise
Lessons taught but never learned
All around us anger burns
Guide the future by the past
Long ago the mould was cast
For they marched up to Bastille Day
La guillotine claimed her bloody prize
Hear the echoes of the centuries
Power isn’t all that money buys
In a recent post about the loneliness that LDS humanities scholars can face in their wards, the topic quickly turns to the “intellectual” in the church (and proves my theory that posts about anti-intellectualism in the church are the best place to find anti-intellectual comments!). The problem with these kinds of discussions, it seems to me, is that the definition of an “intellectual” is highly unclear. Like other terms such as “conservative,” “liberal,” or “feminist,” the label “intellectual” may be either an honorary designation or an insult, depending on who is wielding it. I thought it would be useful to discuss some of the definitions of “intellectual” that I see in the way that it appears in LDS cultural discourse, both the good and the bad. Read more »
Okay, not really. While many of us cringe at the heavy doses of American exceptionalism (often in the most cheesy forms) within Mormon Culture, maybe there is something valuable in viewing American and Christianity as being intertwined. However, not intertwined in a positive sense, like a manifest destiny, but a destructive one. Not sure if I can fully articulate this at the moment, but I think that David Bowie (with some help from Trent Reznor) give an interesting, and very disturbing, interpretation of this mixture of religion and empire.
I almost made it 6 weeks without posting. Not commenting only lasted about two weeks. This worked as well as my attempt to quit Diet Coke. Oh well.
I have discussed my feelings about the bloggernacle in a number of places recently, both in private and in public forums. By putting up some posts about my projects, I hope I can focus my energies in a more productive way. It is also best that I focus my blogging on the friendly confines of my home here at Faith-Promoting Rumor.
As for my feelings about the LDS blogging community overall…well…this video is not only one of my favorites, but it gets to some of my feelings.
Author’s note 2010: I had hoped to write a new post for this year, but given time constraints, I will again share this post. It was originally posted July 3, 2009.
Author’s note: The following is not particularly Mormon Studies (though Martha Nussbaum does hold an appointment in the Divinity School, as well as the Law School and Philosophy Department, at the University of Chicago). It is rooted in my Kantian/Rawlsian approach to Mormonism (which is my Christianity). I decided to post this after thinking about two posts elsewhere on the bloggernacle about Mormonism and Patriotism (here and here).
Introduction
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, I have had doubts about the way in which the lens of nationalism informs my view of the world. While many turned to the flag and the chapel in the aftermath of those attacks, both seemed superficial to me. The loss that day was not an American loss but a loss of humanity. Those lives had value not as Americans (of course, many were not Americans), but as human beings. That many rallied around the banner of patriotism disturbed me then as much then as it does today. To identify life with nationality seems to cheapen life.
My disposition towards patriotism and nationalism led me to approach Martha Nussbaum’s argument for cosmopolitanism in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism with a sense of hope. Nussbaum’s argument is not itself a response to September 11 (since it appears five years earlier) but is instead a call for a new outlook in the age of globalization when we no longer can think of ourselves as strictly local actors. As Americans, we seem to often view the world as our background but at the same time limit our view of the world to those things that are within our own national interest. For Americans this is often the case because of our relative strength, wealth, and cultural influence. But this ease by which we view the world from either a nationalistic or realist point of view is troubling from a moral point of view.
In this post, I will look at Nussbaum’s argument for cosmopolitanism as an alternative to patriotism. After placing Nussbaum’s argument within the larger debate about cosmopolitanism, I will look at a number of critiques of her argument.
I will argue for a form of strong moral cosmopolitanism. I argue that this position is more morally justifiable that patriotism. I will also argue for moral cosmopolitanism over political cosmopolitanism. The purpose of this post is to provide an argument for cosmopolitanism in general and strong moral cosmopolitanism in particular.
I have a theory that I’d like to test about the sociology of knowledge and activity in the church. The well-worn cliche in an exit story about one day discovering something about church history that had been “hidden,” and thereby being thrown into a tailspin has some valence. I think there was a paper delivered at some point that these narratives are structurally the same as LDS “conversion” narratives. Just as many LDS conversions perhaps occur too quickly, this “rebellion” upon coming to realize that one’s parents (the church) are not in fact perfect too often leads to drastic actions. With time, one may reach an understanding that one can love and get along with one’s parents in later years in spite of their imperfections. Of course, maybe the parents really are so terrible that a complete break is needed. Or, maybe this is short sighted. What conditions in one’s life inform how that decision is made? Read more »
So a few weeks ago I was reviewing some recent, secondary literature on the famous scene of Peter’s rebuke in Mk 8:33 (“Get behind me, Satan!”). My own interests were in the language of interscholastic (as in Hellenistic philosophical schools) rebuke and frank criticism. However, during this survey, I quite unexpectedly came upon a passage which caught my interest as a Mormon. The source is Hans F. Bayer’s Das Evangelium des Markus (Witten: Brockhaus, 2008), a volume in the Historisch-Theologische Auslegung series for the NT. The context of the passage is the exegesis of Peter’s rebuke and his misunderstanding of the concept of a messiah. Bayer first points out that Peter’s political messianic expectations clouded his own rebuke of Jesus’ assertion that he must suffer and die. He then discusses the theological implications of such misguided messianic hopes.
“Above all, this notion at the same time unwarily and perfunctorily flouts the fundamental problem of alienation from God. Furthermore this expectation underestimates the power of Satan. The divine way goes to the root of this problem.
Every religion or philosophy of life which over-plays or makes light of these root issues of the fundamental alienation from God and the power of Satan (e.g. Palestinian Judaism, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Buddhism, the doctrine of Confucius, Hinduism; cf. also for example the Stoic philosophy of life), ultimately defies the sovereignty of God and his will, as in the case of Peter. Here also there is fundamental fact that the individual, from his own idealistic perspective, does not require a vicariously suffering Messiah. Only from the revealed perspective of God does the individual recognize his grave alienation and enmity toward God (the burden of sin) as well as the power of Satan. From this he realizes that he is existentially reliant upon the vicariously suffering and, moreover, ruling Messiah.”
I am no specialist in German translation so this rendering is a bit slavish and rough. Also I am not a theologian so I may have botched some technical terms. That being said, what is Bayer suggesting here? Why would Bayer include the Book of Mormon in the list of works, disciplines, or philosophies which either over- or under-play humankind’s alienation from God and the power of Satan? Does the BOM over- or under-play these two issues? Does it over-play the one and under-play the other?
I suppose that the statement surprised me because I think of the BOM as pretty heavy handed when it comes to the notion of humankind’s alienation and dependence upon divinity and the influence/power of Satan. Maybe Bayer is confusing some other Mormon theological developments or ideas bandied about from time to time (humans as divine entities, spirits as co-eternal with God, abolition from the concept of hell, Satan and Jesus as bros, etc.) with what the BOM itself offers.
