Yesterday BYU Studies held a panel discussion by the organizers of last year’s “The Worlds of Joseph Smith” conference, which was held at the Library of Congress. Those participating included Richard Bushman, Robert Millet, and John W. Welch.

(BYU Studies has also just released a copy of the papers presented at the conference in two forms: a softcover BYU Studies issue and a hardcover book.)

Update: The Deseret News features a story today on the panel discussion. To quote a few excerpts:

A panel of those participants told an audience at Brigham Young University on Thursday that Smith’s life and unique contribution to American religious history will continue to be the subject of scholarly inquiry and debate — not all of it “faith-affirming” in the sense that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have grown accustomed to hearing in church.

“We need to navigate the dangerous task carefully between the world of academia and the world of devotion,” said Jack Welch, BYU law professor and symposium co-planner.

….Welch said many scholarly divides came out of the conference, including questions about how or if Smith was created by his environment, about whether he should be examined in the same way other American religious leaders have been, about how much Smith knew about his “mission,” and whether it’s responsible to compare Smith with other religious figures of his day.

Side note: I commented on Mormon Wasp last May that “as John Welch spoke of the significance of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon [in his LOC paper], I thought he must have been reading the recent Times and Seasons debate.” I was referring to the post and discussion here.

Reading through Welch’s paper yesterday, I came across this passage discussing the significance of chiasmus:

While chiasmus is not an exclusively Hebraic style of writing, some biblical scholars have considered it to be highly characteristic of ancient Israelite literature. But opinions range from “chiasmus is solid evidence of the antiquity of the Book of Mormon,” to “chiasmus proves absolutely nothing about anything in the Book of Mormon.”3 Which assessment is correct? Who is making sense? Who is credible, if anyone? Participants in these opinion matches are often intransigently predisposed to their points of view–as often occurs in biblical or religious studies generally–with believers or proponents of certain theories on the one side and skeptics or those who are disaffected on the other. Inquirers who listen in on these in-group volleys must often wonder, what is really going on? ( “Joseph Smith and the Past,” p. 106)

Footnote 3 reads, in part:

Comments such as these posted recently on blogs are not new. A degree of subjectivity, and hence a range of opinions, is inevitably involved in identifying and interpreting any meaningful feature of any literary composition, as I discuss in the introduction to Chiasmus in Antiquity, 13-15. (p. 115)