Mormonism in the Academy
Mormon Studies continued to inch its way towards academic respectability this weekend. Various sessions at the annual meetings of the Society for Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion in Philadelphia featured Mormon topics. I will briefly describe two of them.
The first (search “Welch”) was called “Joseph Smith as a reader of the Bible” chaired by BYU’s Jack Welch and part of a new SBL session that will run annually called “Latter-day Saints and the Bible.” This is no small thing and serves to welcome Mormon research on the Bible into the fold of biblical studies. Biblical doyen David Noel Freedman and several BYU professors spoke at the session.
The second session was a special forum led by Kathleen Flake and featuring Jan Shipps and others that tried to see what a study of Mormonism can offer the wider religious studies community. Specialists in the Old Testament and Chinese ritual (!) were asked to comment on Mormonism in light of their own specialties. This session was stickier and shows that work still has to be done, both in attracting informed outsiders to Mormon Studies, and in getting Mormon partisans to loosen their own grip over the field. It will be interesting to see how these efforts progress. All involved should be congratulated.
Thanks for the report. Can you summarize what Walter Brueggemann said?
Comment by Justin — November 22, 2005 @ 1:58 pm
How was the attendance at those sessions?
Comment by Justin — November 22, 2005 @ 2:02 pm
Brueggerman looked at Book of Mormon use of the OT and said that it was legitimate in a “sensus plenior” kind of way (i.e. it gives the OT a Christian or Mormon flavour, but only in the same way the NT does)
Attendance was pretty good, especially at the AAR session.
Comment by Ronan — November 22, 2005 @ 2:21 pm
I should add that if you go to the AAR site and search “Mormon” you’ll see the other sessions, including John-Charles Duffy on “temple nudity”….
Comment by Ronan — November 22, 2005 @ 2:55 pm
What did Freedman have to say? There’s an LDS girl doing Hebrew Bible with him (though taking a year off to teach at BYU at the moment.)
Comment by Ben S. — November 23, 2005 @ 11:24 am
Freedman talked about bias, and how to avoid it (with regard to how Mormon scholars should proceed in biblical studies.)
Comment by Ronan — November 23, 2005 @ 11:25 am
Should we concern ourselves with “attracting informed outsiders to Mormon Studies” or “in getting Mormon partisans to loosen their own grip over the field”?
To me it seems perfectly appropriate for Mormons to be the foremost (even exclusive) academics in their own speciality. It would be passing strange to see otherwise. Outsiders have ever had little to add in the way of constructive input, and that seems an unlikely trend to change. Just how does “academic respectability” amount to anything more than sophisticated snobbery, and why should we spend our efforts to ingratiate ourselves with such a community?
Comment by Jim Cobabe — November 23, 2005 @ 11:38 am
Jim,
I’m not going to defend the place of Mormon Studies in the academy. For me, it is so obviously a good thing that I do not know how to begin such a defense.
Mormons as the exclusive students of Mormonism? Imagine, if you will, that only Jews were allowed to study the Old Testament, only Christians the New, only Muslims the Quran etc. That would be silly. Perhaps the best current commentator on Mormonism is Jan Shipps. She is not a Mormon. Sometimes an outsider’s eye sees things we miss. You know, the wood through the trees.
Comment by Ronan — November 23, 2005 @ 11:45 am
John-Charles Duffy on “temple nudityâ€â€¦.
Ronan,
Dare I post my theory about why the change to the init.?
Comment by David J — November 27, 2005 @ 11:43 pm
Sully your own blog…!
Comment by Ronan — November 28, 2005 @ 7:49 am