I thought through this balance while listening to Elder Holland’s 2003 General Conference talk on the “Grandeur of God”. I noted that in this excellent, uplifting talk, the characterization of Jesus was taken almost exclusively from the Gospel of John. At first I was troubled that my views were in conflict with an apostle’s, but then I placed the conflict in perspective.

The Fourth Gospel illustrates my point well because I see it as the gospel the most theologically true, but least accurate historically. All Christian literature portrays different degrees of pre- and post-resurrection understanding of Jesus. Our earliest gospel, Mark, best reflects “what really happened” during Jesus’ life. John seems to be the result of a question such as, “If we understood then what we know now about Jesus, what would his ministry have looked like?” Therefore this gospel best captures the resurrected, eternal Jesus, while leaving the historical Jesus behind. But the important point is that it is the eternal Lord Jesus that most readers of the New Testament seek, and it is this Jesus that Elder Holland describes. Again, theological truth trumps historical.

I am not advocating making up inspiring stories and saying they really happened in sacrament talks. I also realize that this position casts a shadow of Plato’s “noble lie”. A critique of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces thoughtfully asked what the problem was with falsified memoirs and powerfully concluded that such falsehood creates “stolen empathy”—when we say we experienced something we have not, we are lessening the suffering of those who have. The simple words “I know what you mean” are so powerful because the price of earning the right to say them can be so high.

There is a difference between putting forth something as true you know is false and working within someone’s interpretive framework. We do this in relationships—tact balances the “truth” of saying whatever is in our heads at any given moment with the deeper truth of our love for those we are talking to. This is how God works (see 2 Nephi 31:3), and the realities of current interpretation also constrain the way we balance theology and history. Is problematizing the historicity of scriptural accounts worth the price of disconnecting general readership from the theological power of these narratives?

Some biblical narratives lend themselves very well to an approach that highlights both history and theology. In Daniel, for example, the historical purpose of encouraging readers to remain faithful in the midst of persecution rings much truer than the message that faith makes you fireproof. Proper understanding of Jonah as a satire enriches the powerful message that God loves all people, rather than diminishing it with literal belief in gastronomical habitation and penitent cattle. The story of Lot and his incestuous daughters is much less troubling when understood as an ancient “redneck joke” than as history. The challenge is that the same approach that enriches these narratives threatens others, such as the Tower of Babel and Ether, or a critical understanding of John 21 and D&C 7.

The ideal is to teach both theological and historical truth in a complementary manner.
In the LDS community, unfortunately, I am doubtful that this will happen to a large extent, given the constraints that modern scripture places on biblical interpretation. You can harmonize the Documentary Hypothesis or Multiple Authorship of Isaiah with the Book of Mormon, but you need to unravel literal interpretation of the latter pretty far to do so.

One of the risks of an intellectual approach to the scriptures is when we look down on the “simple” interpretation of the masses. I value that simplicity of the “truer than true” understanding of the world, see it as needed, even as I embrace biblical scholarship. The complexity of the critical-historical method has value, but also a very high cost. I favor an approach that is responsive rather than aggressive, nurturing inquiry for those drawn to quest historical details, while privileging theological truth for the vast multitude who never will be troubled by such particulars.

Professor H,

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.

Alternative conceptions of just government were completely unwelcome. Alternative conceptions of the good life (alternative, I mean, to the conception of a human race which crouches in the dirt waiting for the next piece of food to be stuffed into its throat by an all-powerful public administrator) were mentioned only to be laughed at. The idea that one has a soul which exists in some way independent of earthly forces acting on it was briefly derided and then abandoned. The treatment of this was so brief that the entire occurrence can be represented here. “Some people,” Prof H. told us, “have this argument that says: ‘You can choose to be happy, no matter what your circumstances.’ Psshh. Well. Thanks. Great. That’s a helpful theory.” After this utterance, we returned to discussions of how we can use DNA tests to help us determine which students deserve to enter college and which deserve to be tossed into a dungeon full of starving wolves by way of punishment for not being genetically worthy specimens of our species.

The entire course revolved around H’s interpretation of Rawls and some lesser Rawlsian philosophers. Moreover, the entire course was in direct conflict with the notion (held by Viktor Frankl, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, C. T. Warner, C. S. Lewis, Hugh Nibley and a large host of thinkers far greater than Rawls) that mankind exists as an agent, not as a machine which responds automatically to outside pressures and commands. When confronted with this concept, H. chuckled but didn’t miss a beat in his lecture. He smoothly carried on with “ . . . clearly, people derive some kind of benefit from contact with nature, so the government should force them to go camping regularly.” Creating a list of activities which make us human beings and without which we are animals is ridiculous. Martha Nussbaum, of course, is the one who created the list; but it was Prof. H who would not allow any serious discussion of it. This entire course flew in the face of an earth history which includes Frankl’s discovery, made in a death camp, that love is stronger than death. It flew in the face of a human past in which Solzhenitsyn realized, while he was in prison, that there is an eternal ideal of justice. It flew in the face of a religion which believes that the son of God realized, through death, the fullness of his love for mankind. It flew in the face of our doctrine that we are free to choose salvation, eternal life and joy no matter what our situation, no matter the harm that can be done to us by other people.

It flew in my face with its refusal to let me say anything unless I was willing to sulk about the injustice of a world in which some people own sketchers and other people wear hand-me-down shoes from D. I. It flew in my face with its constant admonishment that I stop thinking and accept the hard “truth” that people are soulless and cannot be human unless a just government is created which allows them to be so. This class was nonsense. As a senior I’m not unfamiliar with frustration and disappointment. Nevertheless, I’m enormously disappointed that this kind of worthless garbage exists at BYU. Pl Sc 309 from Prof. H is an affront to God, frighteningly akin to Rome, fat-free milk and poser old men with dirty pony-tails.

This student’s comment may have been the highlight of my four plus years at BYU-Idaho and BYU. Thank you.

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!

1. Adviser: I mostly closely followed my adviser’s direction and actively sought out advice at every level of my program and job search. I asked at many stages how I could prepare to strengthen my candidacy, and then did it. There are obviously other models, but I would say for the most part that one should follow the direction of their adviser. Your adviser should be your greatest advocate. You will want to cultivate a good relationship by 1) meeting deadlines and demonstrating responsible behavior, 2) turning in quality work, 3) attending departmental events, 4) showing that you can work well with others, 5) listening to what they have to say, and 6) keeping in touch regularly (I sent a monthly update email to my entire committee during my dissertation phase). Because your adviser will write letters on your behalf, based not only on the quality of your work but on the quality of your professional relationship skills, you should make this relationship important. If you consistently refuse to follow their direction, your adviser will stop giving you good advice and may sour on you. Following your adviser’s counsel does not entail a slavish relationship, but rather a good working relationship where proper amounts of respect and deference are given to the person teaching you.

2. Dissertation: There are lots of kinds of dissertations, but we were instructed to write dissertations that treated a particular subject in depth, set in the framework of broader theoretical and methodological conversations. Most students don’t end up in departments where everyone knows the particulars of their field, yet you will be expected to have intelligent conversations. The way that conversations and intellectual engagement can occur between those in different fields is to participate in broader theoretical issues, either in the study of religion or the humanities more broadly. This may have to with topics like ritual, material culture, sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity, post-colonialism, to name few that are likely to have broad appeal. If your dissertation can appeal to a larger audience, you are going to attract more attention from more hiring committees. A second piece of advice that we got was not to write a dissertation, but write a book. By that, we understood that we should think of our projects as having a longer life than our graduate student career, setting up longer-term career goals. It also meant that really specific monographs might not get published because they weren’t marketable. All that said, if your adviser has strong opinions against this model, see #1 above.

3. Publications and Presentations: We were advised not to spend too much time on publications. Maybe one scholarly article during one’s graduate student years, but not much more was necessary. The most important thing was a good dissertation and all of one’s time should be devoted to that. The same was said about presentations. Having a few was important, but not too many. I had about four presentations at national conferences. Part of the reason for this relative lack of public exposure (I know students with far more presentations and publications) was that it was feared that we might underperform. Since the entire time you are a graduate student you are technically on the market, you should make sure that all of your public performances are top-notch, whether presentations or publications. If not, the line on your CV is not worth your damaged credibility. This is admittedly an extreme view, and I am not sure it should be universally practiced, but the core idea of quality over quantity is important to heed. In following this practice, I had relatively few presentations and publications, and was also not very well networked outside of my own institution (though admittedly was well networked within my larger department), compared to other students I’ve known. These things ended up being less important than I thought.

4. Teaching Experience: The opportunities that one has will be determined in large part by the institution one is at. Nevertheless, in my case I focused on getting a range of experience as a teaching fellow in a variety of courses in my field and in religious studies more broadly. I worked on getting experience teaching graduate students and undergraduates, on advising theses, designing syllabi, and leading discussions. Again, you will likely have to teach outside of your core specialty, and one way of demonstrating competence and interest to do this is to teach outside of your speciality while a graduate student. One great example is to teach a theory and methods course in religious studies.

5. Coursework and Languages: I took courses and languages that would credential me in my field, but I also took methodological courses in religious studies more broadly, and I took courses in other religious traditions than my area of emphasis so that I could have a broader base of knowledge in the field, in my future teaching, and for comparative purposes for my own projects. I think that this prepared me to situate my work in broader conversations, which I think is both intellectually and professionally productive.

6. Mormonness: There are two diametrically opposed schools of thought on this. 1) Mormonism should be avoided completely as a topic of research, presentation, and publication for graduate students in religion not working directly on Mormonism. 2) Mormonism is interesting and if it interests you and you shouldn’t try to hide it because it is in part why you may have joined this field, and because it can also make you unique. I tended toward the former, though I have seen people be successful in the academy with both models. Let me sketch out some general cautions on this that might chart a middle path. First, if you are in a field that is not Mormon studies, but would like to participate in Mormon studies conversation related to your field, at least try to balance your work between them. That is, if you publish or present on a Mormon topic, try to match it with something more immediately in your field so that your CV doesn’t look out of balance with things not relevant to your field. Second, in my limited understanding of the dynamics of the discipline of religious studies, apologetics in the traditional sense is treated with suspicion (this is true of all apologetics, perhaps especially Mormon apologetics if only for our relative strangeness). If you engage in this type of work, you should be aware that at least some potential hiring committees may by skeptical of you. Third, Mormonism is not necessarily something that you want to hide or be deceptive about. After all, you want to be at a place that wants you, including your Mormonness. If someplace is going to have a major problem with that, you don’t want to be there anyway. There is something to be said about getting to know you first as a scholar and a person in order to challenge perceptions of Mormonism once they find out later, though.

Summary: After rereading what I have written here, a few themes emerge. 1) Make an effort to situate your teaching and research in broader conversations than your narrow area of expertise. 2) Cultivate strong relationships with those who will later advocate for you in letters of recommendation. 3) Make sure that the work you present to the public is as strong as it can be. In a way, this is pretty generic, common sense advice. I’d add that there is a great deal to be said about “fit” in wherever you land. This is not just about personality, but about departmental needs, intellectual interests, etc. Not getting a job doesn’t necessarily say anything about your skills or potential, but is usually about what kinds of things the particular people in a particular department find interesting. There are many, many excellent candidates our there and getting chosen or not getting chosen for any particular job does not reflect your skills. The process can be extremely deflating, so keeping your confidence up and having a lot of patience are also necessary. Good luck!

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.

What do you think he meant?

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.

In April, BYU and UVU hosted a conference on religion and human rights. The speakers and panelists heavily favored the idea that human rights relied on religion. Whether it was grounded in natural rights or religious society the relationship between religion and human rights was a positive one. I found much of this to be odd.

Then came one of the last sessions of the multi-day gathering. Bruce Landesman, my long-time hero from the philosophy department at the University of Utah, was the lone speaker arguing that human rights did not need a religious foundation. He was speaking my language, heavily drawing on the Kantian constructivist tradition; though he did throw in a cool quote from Bentham (both Landesman and I have a growing appreciation for the contributions of Utilitarianism, despite deep reservations).

I realized, while listening to Landesman, that I did not fit in a BYU for a reason: I was a liberal without apology. I think that Rousseau put Hobbes and Locke to rest. I think Aristotle is brilliant, but of limited use in the 21st century…even those that use him now, do so in light of Kant and modern conceptions of liberty. I have no problem with the secular public square…

I am a Ute…

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.”

By this statement I don’t think his intent was to belittle the historian’s craft — though, maybe it was — and certainly not to say that religious studies is a-historical work. At any rate, I don’t necessarily want to discuss the differences between academic departments and the advantages that could be claimed for one over another, as if people only do a certain kind of work in a certain department. (For the record, I personally think of what I do as historical more than anything else.) I’m also not yet sure how the tension between faith and scholarship could be employed creatively in the academy. But I do have an example or two of how tension between what I’ll loosely call secularism and faith has produced some pretty amazing ideas in religion.

To go a bit further, I would like to posit that learning to live with that tension is the lot of the Mormon intellectual, a lot that tends to be more challenging than that of members of the church who deny or are unaware of there being any tension, as well as more challenging than that of those who choose to leave the church and thereby minimize if not eliminate it altogether. On the chance that such a position is obvious and uncontroversial, I also want to toss out the crazy notion that a comfortably or at least resignedly tense Mormon intellectual might even be more … well, let’s try … academically responsible than those who decide to leave the church. Crazy, I know. My suspicion is that those who decide to leave based on intellectual reasons may not be looking for the truth or answer to a crisis of faith so much as opting to avoid tension, in the same way, though probably not to the same extent, that others might deny tension exists. As I say, it is a suspicion, and I won’t really be supplying evidence or making arguments for verification or falsification, as the case may be. That I hope to find in the comments along with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The comparisons I am going to make serve to illustrate my thoughts. I don’t claim that they prove much of anything.

My first example of a highly creative, tension-produced idea in religion comes from the early church. As we all know from Acts and most entertainingly Galatians, among other things the conversion of non-Jews brought with it the issue of whether or not circumcision should be required of gentile Christians. Less well known are extra-canonical solutions to the enduring problem of Christianity’s inheritance (I’m trying to be diplomatic; if you prefer, read: appropriation and perversion) of Jewish scripture. Allow me to sketch a couple of them.

Marcionites are reported to have believed that the Hebrew Bible was not inspired by the Savior, his Father, etc. They only read a modified Gospel of Luke and Paul’s letters as scripture. Sethians are reported to have believed that the Hebrew Bible was inspired primarily by seven more or less jealous and malevolent angels. However, Divine Wisdom also spoke through the prophets from time to time about the superior deities and the coming of the Savior. So Jewish scripture could still be very much worth reading. Valentinians are reported to have believed that Jesus himself spoke under different sources of inspiration, namely, in order of divinity: the transcendent Savior who possessed him, Sophia, and the God of Jewish scripture. As for the l/Law itself, according to Valentinian thinkers it was divided into three parts, the first attributed to the Jewish God seen as neither the perfect Father of the Savior nor a daemonic angel; the second attributed to Moses, who, “starting from his own ideas, gave some laws;” and the third attributed to “the elders of the [Jewish] people, who are responsible for having introduced some commandments of their own.” The first part of the l/Law, the one inspired by the just God of Israel, had three subdivisions of its own. The Decalogue (1a) was said to be pure and unmixed with evil though imperfect and requiring fulfillment by the Savior. An eye for an eye (1b) and the like was said to be mixed with baseness and injustice and to be destroyed by the Savior. And finally, stuff like circumcision (1c) was said to have symbolic value that the Savior came to reveal.

Each of these three solutions resulted from the tension between faith and secularism, in this case, between Judeo-Christianity and the larger Greco-Roman world. However, the Marcionite solution isn’t very creative or sophisticated. To their credit, the Marcionites recognized that there was a problem, more so than your average proto-orthodox church father. But in order to put an end to the tension they were experiencing, they oversimplified the problem and cut all ties with Judaism and its scripture. In short, the Marcionites did not solve the problem of what to do with the Hebrew Bible so much as find a way to avoid having to address it anymore. The Sethian and in particular the Valentinian solutions, on the other hand, account for a great deal. Whether viable or practical or true or not, I would go so far as to say that the Valentinian solution is the work of genius.

My second example of a brilliant religious idea born (of necessity) in the creative space opened up by faith and secularism in tension comes from the modern church. Not totally unlike the early Christians, we Mormons have inherited a holy book of scripture complete with some potential problems. Attempts at solving the problem of Book of Mormon historicity range from inspired fiction to the expansion model to a post-Columbian setting advanced in this stunning post of last week (or this week, depending where you start the seven-day cycle). I confess that I have spent more time reading around in early Christian literature than in Mormon studies and do not have mastered the sources and issues invovled in Book of Mormon historicity. Nonetheless I would like to compare the Valentinian solution to Christian inheritance of the Hebrew Bible described above with Jonathan Green’s post. And the correlate to the Marcionite solution, you ask? Well, as with all comparisons, things start to break down if pushed too far. It could in some ways be likened to seeing the Book of Mormon as inspired fiction. But how about comparing it to leaving the church? Is leaving really an answer to the problem, or a symptom of tension fatigue?

So there you have it. Must I hand over my aspiring scholar membership card now?

First up, Lincoln Blumell’s advice to LDS Graduate Students in Biblical Studies and cognate fields is as follows:

(1) GET YOUR DISSERTATION COMPLETED ASAP!
In this extremely difficult job market you will not get a job (permanent or tenure track) unless you have completed a PhD. Do not spend your time doing extra teaching in the spring or summer semesters but use those four months to finish a chapter in your dissertation. In the short term it will be more difficult but in the long term it will pay big dividends. Likewise, if you can go a semester or two without holding a Teaching Assistantship do it in order to get the dissertation completed. There are way too many people with ABD status that, to put it bluntly, will never land a good position until they complete the dissertation. Likewise, my advice is that you should not take more than 5 or 6 years to finish your PhD otherwise potential employers will want to know why you have taken so long to finish and they may have suspicions about whether you will be able to meet deadlines as an employee.

(2) DO NOT WRITE ANYTHING UNLESS YOU PLAN ON PUBLISHING IT!
At the PhD level if you are not writing papers that are first presentable at a conference (i.e. AAR, NAPS, SBL, etc.) and then publishable in either peer-reviewed journals or a reputable volume of collected essays then you seriously need to ask yourself what you are doing. I strongly recommend that anyone serious about getting a job should have 3 or 4 conference presentations under their belt at the time they complete their PhD and at least 2 published articles. When I began applying for jobs in the fall 2008 (start of my last year of my PhD) I was fortunate to land a position. This only happened because my PhD was almost completed and I had about 6 or 7 articles published. In fact, many of the places I had applied to made me provide them with a PDF copy of what I had completed on my PhD to ensure that I was actually nearly finished. *FYI: Most job postings (permanent or tenure track) in Biblical Studies and cognate fields will usually get between 60 and 80 applications (sometimes over 100 applications!). So you have to do all that you can to make sure that you are marketable and attractive.

(3) LDS Publications and Apologetics:
If you want to do LDS apologetics or present or publish in LDS venues by all means do so. However, there is a potentially negative side to this. What I mean here is that the time you spend doing LDS things takes away from time that could have been spent on the dissertation or on articles that could have been presented/published elsewhere (remember, the dissertation should trump everything else as a graduate student). The reason this potentially could be a problem is because virtually everywhere except for a few places these publications will not be taken as seriously and will not be counted the same as other articles – say in JBL for example. If you only do LDS publications then you are only making yourself attractive/marketable to either BYU or CES. On the other hand, if you are publishing elsewhere you have a much wider appeal and are still attractive to BYU and CES. I am not trying to discourage graduates students from doing LDS scholarship; I just want graduate students to know that with the limited time you have you must make decisions that will make you the most attractive to a broad audience. There is only one BYU and there are potentially thousands of other institutions where you could work. Keep this in mind as you decide what projects you will take on as a graduate student. As a graduate student I focused exclusively on non-LDS related publications. This landed me a position at Tulane and now I am at BYU, so go figure.

(4) Should I try to hide the fact that I am LDS to potential employers?
In job interviews at most places I would personally recommend not disclosing that one is LDS (BYU excepted). This is not just because of potential biases against the LDS faith, which are certainly out there in academia, but because in job interviews you want the potential employer to focus exclusively on your scholarship, research, and teaching abilities and not be distracted by other things. In fact, if one were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or otherwise I would give them the same advice, especially if they were interviewing at either a public university or a university with no religious affiliation. During job interviews I never made it a point to go out of my way to state that I was LDS. Having said that, if a potential employer would have asked if I was religious (which in most interviews would have been inappropriate) without reservation I would have let them know that I was LDS. At my previous job when people found out that I was LDS I could tell that there were a few raised eyebrows at the start but once they saw that I was a competent faculty member no one seemed to really care.

(5) How did your LDS background factor in when applying for jobs and landing your current job?
Initially my LDS background had no bearing in applying for jobs. I did not do any of my degrees at BYU and so although I was LDS I felt no great desire to teach at BYU. All the same, I certainly did not rule it out either. When I started to apply for jobs in the Fall 2008 there were only about 6 or 7 jobs in all of North America in the area of Early Christianity/New Testament that were permanent positions at research universities. I landed four interviews and fortunately in one of them I got the job (At the time BYU was in a hiring freeze so although I had been in touch with people at BYU there were no job openings). During my first year it came to my attention that BYU was able to hire and I applied for the position. It was a better position than the one I had (in terms of salary, research opportunities, etc.) and I now had a desire to teach in a LDS environment. I have been very happy with the position thus far and have really enjoyed my short time at BYU. I look forward to teaching in an LDS context but will continue to publish mostly in non LDS venues because of my research interests (i.e. Papyrology, Christian Egypt, Ancient Epistolography).

(6) Final Thoughts:
As BYU is gradually lifting the hiring freeze there will be a number of job openings in the future in Biblical Studies and cognate fields. In fact, I suspect that there is going to be significant turnover of faculty in the Depart of Ancient Scripture within the next 5 to 10 years as nearly half the faculty is approaching retirement. A number of people reading this entry will probably be interested in the positions. To put yourself in a competitive position (academically speaking) for these openings get your dissertation completed and get your research out in the open though publications.

Good luck with graduate school and as I was warned at the start of my graduate studies at Oxford: “Don’t fritter away your time!” Make the most of your graduate experience and focus on those things that will get you a JOB!

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

By Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart

2. An intellectual is a liberal. Just as the term liberal can be either a compliment or an insult, the equating of intellectual with liberal cuts both ways.

3. An intellectual is dangerously “secular.” There is no calling of an “intellectual” in the church. This is a term foreign to LDS culture and status designations, and is therefore seen as an intrusion of values from the outside.

4. An intellectual is simply a smart person. If someone reads books, even a lot of books, they are just as qualified to express their intellectual opinion as those with professional training as scholars. In this way, a scholar does not have any particular value other than being smart, which is also the case of the intellectual.

5. An intellectual is a smart person who agrees with me. In this view, being an intellectual is judged by the criteria of my own beliefs and opinions. If you hold those, and are smart, you are an intellectual.

6. An intellectual is someone who works in the humanities. Critical and creative thinking is simply non-existent in other fields like business, law, medicine, and science. Perhaps to put it more generously, an intellectual is one who deals with a particular set of questions about meaning, language, and truth that are make it distinctive from other disciplines.

7. An intellectual is a professional scholar. Only those who are graduate students or otherwise paid professionals as scholars can properly claim this title.

8. An intellectual is someone is someone who belongs to the group of intellectuals. Like other other official and unofficial designations, from dentists to environmentalists, an intellectual is someone who shares the values of, and is recognized by, other intellectuals. These may include features like those who ask questions that non-intellectuals do not ask, and is open to questions. An intellectual is able to converse with those with whom she disagrees on a shared set of discourses, to articulate the assumptions, problems, and logic of their own views and those of others. In this view, an intellectual has no particular ideological affiliation other than the rules of intellectual discourse, but even those rules may be open to review if done in an intellectual manner.

Now, I prefer the last definition, both because I see it as the most generous and most neutral, but I could be willing to be persuaded otherwise (does that make me an intellectual? . One problem with the others is that they are used in polemical, rather than descriptive definitions. Perhaps one of the reasons why the title “intellectual” is both revered and reviled is the American cultural tendency to both despise and praise hierarchy. For instance, the category of the “rich” is both hated and admired. Of course, there is no purely descriptive, non political category, but neither is there a world without categories. To keep the category of “intellectual,” and to try to define it in a way that is useful, seems like a worthwhile effort.