Colonization, Conformity, and Contribution, Part I

Many posts at FPR of late have had to do with Kent Jackson’s description of LDS scholarship. At issue is to what extent Latter-day Saints can (or should) engage in a dialogue with the greater world of academia, and to what extent we should let our faith claims dictate our research and conclusions.

This issue has been recently exemplified in a prominent, front-page Daily Universe (BYU’s student-run newspaper) article entitled “Mysteries of Ancient Egyptian Papyri Revealed” (Feb 15, 2007), complete with imposing but poorly produced graphic. The article first describes how BYU/Maxwell Institute uses multispectral imaging to read otherwise illegible texts written on papyri and other materials. It then goes on to describe some of the contents of these texts and notes that many students are participating in the work.

Imagine my horror when the article was emailed to a major ANE mailing list with the following paragraphs included:

Elder McConkie and Targumim, or How to Help LDS Read Non-KJV Versions

I recently discovered that Elder McConkie was aware of Targums, translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic. I’ll discuss his understanding of them and a tantalizing tidbit stemming therefrom in my next post.

In the meanwhile, that discovery helped me formulate a strategy for helping certain kinds of LDS readers to understand that it’s ok to read and study non-KJV editions of the Bible. The following handout (necessarily limited due to space and audience) is what I prepared for an Institute class to make this point.

How to Understand the Temple

The vast majority of LDS historical and theological thinking about the temple has attempted to find ancient parallels to Mormon temple rituals. In this view the Mormon temple is a restored completion of fragments and traces of an original, authentic temple ritual. However, this approach doesn’t explain how modern American Mormons understood such rituals. Other approaches have attempted to account for the temple in a strictly derivative relationship to Masonry. The Mormon temple ritual is thus a “borrowed” version of what the Masons were doing. But this doesn’t explain why such borrowings were successful and appealed to Mormons. I want to suggest that both frameworks are impoverished ways of making sense of the temple. Instead, I think that situating the temple rituals in larger American cultural frameworks makes better sense than these two approaches, while also explaining the appeal of the temple to 19th- and early-20th-century Mormons. This cultural framework is the flourishing of voluntary associations and fraternal organizations that dominated American society from the early 1800’s through the 1950’s, which were especially strong from 1850 to 1920. Some estimates have noted that over one third of American men were involved in one or more fraternal organization during this time.

Welcoming TT

Dear Blog World,
I am very pleased to be a part of this merger and hope that all my wildest dreams for it will come true. Basically, FPR can now claim to be the biggest Bible and Religion wonkfest in the bloggernacle. I have always admired the intellectual energy of those who blog here and am grateful for the opportunity to work with them.
Love,
TT (The Blogger Formerly Known as TrailerTrash)

Mergers and Acquisitions

We here at Faith-Promoting Rumor are pleased to announce a merger with the folks at Urban Mormonism. They have agreed to join forces with us here in an effort to get posts up here by people other than Mogget and Lxx. I, for one, am pleased as punch as I will finally have time for my magnum opus: The use of the Hebrew preposition b as a directional marker for the position of Kolob within the context of the Book of Mormon Isaiah passages. Coming soon to a “Know Your Religion” fireside near you!

The Urbanites will be introducing themselves shortly. Please welcome them.

Introducing Nitsav Lariv

Hello. I’m a new semi-perma-blogger here at FPR. I’m a graduate student in a similar field to these other folks, though much more Old Testament than New. I’ve been a denizen of the bloggernacle for a long time, posting here, there, and everywhere.

My moniker comes from a favorite passage of Isaiah, 3:13. KJV “The LORD standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people.” This really does NOT convey the force of the Hebrew.

The first verb is nitsav, meaning to stand up, but also stand up against, take or make one’s stand with more force than mere standing.

“To plead” also doesn’t quite carry the right force. Lariv means “to contend with.” More technically, it means to bring to court, to sue. It finds usage in what has been called the “prophetic lawsuit.” In other words, God is about to lay the smack down on the Israelites.

The second phrase, paralleling the first, is omed ladin, “he stands to judge.” This phrase was my first choice for pen name, and I quickly dismissed it for obvious reasons when I saw how it looked it English. I suppose I could have written it more like it’s pronounced, omayd ladeen, but I didn’t think about that when coming up with the name.

The NRSV captures it better than the KJV, though of course, you should just all learn Hebrew. “The LORD rises to argue his case; he stands to judge the peoples.”

I’m glad to be at FPR, hoping to post once a week or so.

Tomorrow I’ll have a post about Elder McConkie, Targumim, and Bible translations.

The Best Books?

In today’s Daily Unifarce, I mean… Universe, buried in the back (on p.11) was an interesting article about how LDS college age students don’t buy, and therefore must not read, Gospel-topic literature from places like Deseret Book. It also includes in a side bar the top 10 suggestions for which books are the most influential among Mormons and which are considered required reading in religious circles. Yeah, this is going to be good.

Orthodoxy VS. Orthopraxy

I’ve been pondering (much akin to Pinky and the Brain) about the place of the Church in the categorization of orthodoxy and orthopraxy of late. I figured that we’d run out our last theme fairly thoroughly. Anyways, I don’t know exactly what it was that spurred the pondering in me but (must have been something in church) but today I listened to a lecture by Dan Peterson which went over this topic as a part of a broader comparison of Semitic world view tendencies versus Greek world view tendencies and their reflections in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and I have been inspired to write.

African-American, Feminist, and Mormon Biblical Studies

Recent discussions here and elsewhere have focused on the role of contemporary critical biblical studies and their relationship to Mormon biblical studies. Many have questioned not only the methods of a “scholarly” Mormon biblical studies, but also its possibility. In some circles, the dominant model for appropriation of contemporary scholarship is denominational, and the Catholic experience is taken as emblematic. I have been critical of such a model here. As a result, I hope to suggest an alternative model for what Mormon biblical studies might look like.

Modern academic biblical scholarship focuses on exegesis. Such an approach has transcended denomination boundaries by attempting an “objective” accounting of the text’s own theological position. Such a view is grounded in the idea that the text says something on its own that the careful reader can discern. This view often implicitly assumes that there is a single correct reading of the text that corresponds to the “author’s intent.”

African American and feminist biblical scholarship has critiqued this view, primarily on the grounds of hermeneutics. The idea of there being a single meaning to a text, not only at the time that it was written, but through its history of interpretation, has been abandoned long ago in the philosophy of interpretation, yet the guild of biblical studies often continues to cling to such a view. There is no objective lens and the supposedly objective methods of biblical scholarship have their own history. Further, the quest for the “original” meaning is rooted in a kind of impluse for truth that makes the fundamentalist Christians and professional biblical exegetes look a lot alike. The hermeneutical framework is largely the same; the only difference are the details.

As an alternative, African American and feminist biblical studies have made “ethics” into a central interpretive lens. Questions of liberation, justice, and power have become the framework for interpretation. Such an approach looks at how different communities have interpreted the text and considers these legitimate, even though, for examlple, African American slave hermeneutics were largely developed by illiterate people who only heard the text, but never read it. This approach further recognizes that all interpretations are selective, choosing to highlight some aspects of the text while ignoring others. As such, these hermeneutical approaches are not concerned with the mythical “author’s intent”, but with the possibilities that are produced by the text.

I propose that Mormon biblical studies follow a similar model. As far as I am aware, such an approach does not yet exist within Mormonism. For Mormon biblical studies, the task is to read Mormons who have written on the Bible and the derive a set of hermeneutical principles that are at work in their interpretations. This is somewhat of a task suited for anthropology. However, for scholarly Mormon biblical studies, the goal would then be to situate these principle as they speak to the “Mormon experience.” This is not a universal reading, but a historically situated reading of Mormons. The goal is not to point out that the text doesn’t “really” say what they think it says, but to demonstrate the principles on which it is based and to cull from it larger reflections about ethics and Mormon experiences.

As I have argued previously, the only important divisions in the feild of biblical studies are hermeneutical, not doctrinal or denominational. While these approaches I think are dying or irrelevant, feminist and African American hermeneutics have become centrally important, often taught even in introductory level courses. We have to give up on the idea that the text is going to resolve doctrinal or denominational disputes. Instead, the hermeneutical divisions rest on whether there is a single meaningful meaning to the text. The opposition I think rightly questions the possibility of such an “objective” understanding of the text, its utility, or both.

Barlow going to USU

It’s official: Philip Barlow will fill the new Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University (see Salt Lake Tribune story here). This will likely disappoint some prospective students of Claremont Graduate University. However, it’s great news for USU students. Barlow is an excellent scholar by all standards. So what are your initial thoughts on the appointment?