It was a monumental effort to create this version of the Book of Mormon.
109 search results for "grant hardy"
10 Questions with Grant Hardy
We’re happy to share an other in our series of interviews by Kurt Manwaring. This week’s is his interview with Grant Hardy. He’s the author of the recently released The Book of Mormon: Maxwell Institute Study Edition. Kevin Barney recently reviewed that study edition. Prior to that he was well known for the Book of Mormon: A Readers Edition which nicely formatted the Book of Mormon into paragraphs following the original text. The new Maxwell Study Edition builds on that adding extensive notes and making use of Royal Skousen’s work on a critical text. Grant teaches Chinese history at University of North Carolina at Asheville. We’re quite excited to be able to share part of this interview with 10 Questions.
12 Questions, Book of Mormon, Book Reviews, Cornucopia, Features, Latter-day Saint Thought, Mormon Studies
12 Questions with Grant Hardy – part II
Here is the conclusion of Times & Seasons look at Grant Hardy’s new book Understanding the Book of Mormon, and the second half of our 12 Questions interview:
12 Questions, Book of Mormon, Book Reviews, Essential Texts in Mormon Studies, Features, Mormon Studies, Scriptures
12 Questions with Grant Hardy – part I
To cap off our roundtable review of Grant Hardy’s new book Understanding the Book of Mormon we’re fortunate to feature an interview with the book’s author. The interview will be posted in two parts. Our thanks to all who have participated, and especially Bro. Hardy.
Grant Hardy and Personal Scripture Study
Every semester, one of my principal goals in my tax classes is to get my students to engage with the Internal Revenue Code. And it’s harder than you might think: often they don’t read the Code itself, focusing instead on the explanations in their casebook.[fn1] And their aversion to reading the Code is completely understandable: unlike court decisions, the mainstay of law school, there is no narrative flow, no character, no imagery, nothing that we traditionally latch onto in order to immerse ourselves in a text. And frankly, using the casebook isn’t a bad short-term decision. The casebook explains what the Code provisions mean and how they’re applied, at least in simple situations.But in the longer term, relying on the casebook’s explanation does my students a disservice. While it helps them be able to answer my questions in class, and while it likely helps them do decently on my exams, if they rely on the casebook at the expense of reading through and struggling with the Code, they don’t develop their skills in reading and understanding the Internal Revenue Code. Ultimately, while their casebook helps them understand the tax law on a surface level (and, for that matter, provides a necessary starting point), if they’ve read the casebook at the expense of reading the Code, they’re going to be in trouble when my final asks them to read and apply a Code section that we never read in class.[fn2] In…
An Unsettling Book: Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon
This is the fourth in a series of reviews of Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (OUP, 2010) that we are posting this week at Times and Seasons. It says something about the book that there is still a lot to talk about.
Grant Hardy’s Subject Problem
Criticisms of the Book of Mormon generally fall into one of two categories: objections to its historical claims on the one hand, and on the other critiques of its literary style. The two prongs are often combined in a single attack, for instance in the suggestion that the awkward style of the book reflects the naïve voice of an unlettered youngster. For their part, the book’s defenders also tend to elide the two categories, arguing that passages of inelegant prose are better understood as latent Hebraisms laboring under English syntax. Most of the time, of course, devout readers of the Book of Mormon simply ignore the book’s style altogether. Grant Hardy, in his new book Understanding the Book of Mormon, wants to uncouple the problems of historicity and literary merit. He brackets the first, setting aside the apologetic debates that have dominated Book of Mormon studies over the past four decades. Instead, he turns his attention to the content of the book, and in particular to its peculiar stylistic qualities—and on this matter if he is no apologist he is nevertheless a bit apologetic, conceding the book’s literary deficiencies but pleading on its behalf that, to borrow a Twainism, the Book of Mormon is “better than it sounds” (273). Hardy seeks to rehabilitate the literary reputation of the Book of Mormon by drawing attention to what he calls its “organizing principle”: “the fact that it presents itself as the work…
A Review of Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon
In On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary, we get a fascinating peek into Richard Bushman’s psyche during the time immediately after the publication of his monumental work, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.
Grant Hardy Week at Times & Seasons
Times and Seasons is excited this week to present to you a roundtable series review of Grant Hardy’s recent book Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford 2010). The upcoming posts will not only acquaint you with book itself, but also provide our opinionated responses, and of course, allow you all to join in the fray. Best of all, Brother Hardy has agreed to participate in a 12 Questions Interview that will cap off the whole affair. To begin, for those of you not already familiar, we want to introduce the author himself. Dr. Grant Hardy is currently Professor of History and Religious Studies and the Director of the Humanities Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. After serving a mission in Taiwan he earned his B.A. in Ancient Greek at BYU followed by a PhD in Classical Chinese Language and Literature from Yale University. Professor Hardy is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades for both his teaching and scholarship. In his current post he received the 2002 Distinguished Teacher Award for the Arts and Humanities Faculty, and he was named to a Ruth and Leon Feldman Professorship for 2009-2010. He is also the recipient of a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Hardy has published Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History (Columbia 1999); The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China (Greenwood 2005); and the first…
Grant Hardy at Meridian
So I haven’t exactly been a fan of Meridian, but lately they have been running some very innovative stuff from Grant Hardy; see here and here. And I suppose you can discuss his essays in the comments here, if you play nice.
Come, Follow Me: Book of Mormon Resources
As Jonathan has been pointing out in his posts about Reading the Book of Mormon in wartime and Book of Mormon historical revisionism, we are only a few weeks out from starting the next year of the reading cycle. Come, Follow Me 2024, will focus on the Book of Mormon. We’ve had posts and discussions about what are some good resources in the past, such as the one David Evans put up about this time during the previous reading cycle that are worth looking over in preparation. But there are some good resources that are more recent that are worth discussing as well.
Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2023
A monthly piece summarizing all recent, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books published on Latter-day Saints. Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History. Oxford University Press, 2023. The venerable Richard Bushman’s latest; a cultural history on the golden plates as artifacts. He’s been working on this for years. “Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others—from Smith’s first encounter with them to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why do they remain objects of fascination to this day?” Fenton, Elizabeth. “The Book of Mormon and Book History.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 32 (2023): 74-96. It’s paywalled, so it’s hard to know what it’s about. Oman, Nathan B. “Property and the Latter-day Saint Tradition.” William & Mary Law School Research Paper No. Forthcoming (2023). Theological and historical exploration of Mormon perceptions of property and their ambiguities. Oman, Nathan B. “‘A Welding Link of Some Kind’: A Minimalist Theology of Same-Sex Marriage Sealings.” Nathan B. Oman, Law and the Restoration: Law and Latter-day Saint History, Thought, and Scripture (Salt Lake City, Utah: Kofford Books, Forthcoming) (2023). Theological exploration of the possibility of same-sex sealings. “This essay canvases the history of Latter-day Saint sealing rules and practices and argues that when viewed in their entirety, it is difficult to map these practices on to a particular model of…
Producing Ancient Scripture: Q&A with Editors Mark Ashurst-McGee and Mike MacKay
Following on Chad’s recent discussions, I’m happy to share another offering in what has become a T&S mini–series on the recent volume Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2020). Editors Mark Ashurst-McGee and Mike MacKay here respond to my questions on the genesis of the volume and its implications. The intriguing question of “what we talk about when we talk about Joseph Smith’s translation activities” has enjoyed extraordinary scholarly attention in 2020. Producing Ancient Scripture offers an embarrassment of riches, with twenty authors approaching the question from historical, textual, psychological, and theological perspectives. It is the most comprehensive volume on the topic to date, and the avenues it marks now define the groundwork of the field. This is a landmark book. It brings together 20 scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds for a deep dive into what it means when we talk about Joseph Smith’s work as a translator. How did the volume originate, and why is it a necessary contribution at this moment? Mike: In 2013, the translation of the Book of Mormon was a hotly debated topic at the Joseph Smith Papers Project and the Church’s new Gospel Topics essay on the subject was being discussed. I had worked on the topic for the Papers and was working on a book for Latter-day Saints about the translation and publication of the…
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. Vb2-3. The utility of philology: Nephite origins
Thinking of the Book of Mormon as the result of a series of textual accretions and combinations might help make sense of how curiously overdetermined the account of Nephite origins is.
A Lake of Fire and the Problem of Evil
I remember talking to an atheist on the riverfront walk in Dubuque, Iowa one day while serving my mission. He told my companion and me that he couldn’t believe in God after some of the things he had seen, and went on to describe (in a fair amount of gruesome detail) visiting a Catholic church in South America in the aftermath of an attack by a militant group of some sort and seeing the mutilated bodies of the Christians laying scattered about. If God existed, he reasoned, God would have not allowed such horrific act to take place. I was taken aback and was uncertain how to respond to his expression of disbelief rooted in such deep trauma. We talked with the man for a little while longer and moved on in with the day. His comments got at one of the most difficult and complex philosophical issues of Christian religion—the theodicy, the question of why evil exists if God exists, is good, and is all-powerful. That evening, I remember talking about the incident with my companion and thinking (somewhat naïvely): “I should have just opened up the Book of Mormon to Alma 14, where Alma and Amulek watch their converts burn and discuss why they can’t do anything about it. That would have shown him how we have all the answers.” Looking back, however, I’m grateful we didn’t turn to that section of the Book of Mormon during our…
Seer Stones and Grammar
Book of Mormon translation is one of those interesting subjects that is central to the ongoing Book of Mormon wars. As well, to me, one interesting aspect about the Book of Mormon is how self-aware of its own creation it is. For example, in Mosiah 8 (part of this week’s “Come, Follow Me” discussion), there is a discussion about seership and the use of “interpreters” that allow the owner to “look, and translate all records that are of an ancient date” (Mosiah 8:13). In the case discussed in the scriptures, the seer is King Mosiah II and the record is the Jaradite plates that Zeniff’s colony discovered. While it doesn’t explicitly link this to the future translation of the Book of Mormon, it is interesting to be given a glimpse into the same method that Joseph Smith said he used to produce the Book of Mormon being used within the Book of Mormon. Ultimately, we don’t know much about the process by which the Book of Mormon was brought to us or the role of seer stones (interpreters) in that process. There is a mountain of conflicting evidence to sift through in trying to pin down a viable theory of translation. As Grant Hardy wrote: “There is still no consensus among LDS scholars as to how the translation process worked. Some think that Joseph received spiritual impressions through the seer stone that he then put into his own words, while…
Review: Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time
Michael Austin’s book, Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time is a quick, insightful and though-provoking read about the Book of Mormon. The book began its life as a series of blog posts at By Common Consent, documenting some of Austin’s thoughts as he read the Book of Mormon in-depth for the first time in decades (after spending a significant amount of time during those decades focused on literary criticism and Biblical studies). The book, published by the By Common Consent Press earlier this year, takes the form of a collection of short essays that, as put by the author, are “not scholarly articles, or even well-thought-out personal essays; rather, they are the record of a deeply personal experiment upon the word.”[1] A bit of background on the author: Michael Austin is a former English professor who currently serves as an academic administrator in Evansville, Indiana. He has published several books and articles, with the subjects of political discourse in the United States of America and literary criticism of the Bible and Mormon Literature being some of the notable topics. A few of his published books include Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem (Greg Kofford Books, Inc., 2014), That’s Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America’s Right Wing (Prometheus, 2012), and Reading the World: Ideas that Matter (W. W. Norton & Company). He also has written for the By Common…
Win the Battle, Lose the War – Reading Nephi – 17:48-55
The eternal cosmological drama in which we’re embedded demands that we work to reflect the divinity of our enemies back to them if we wish them to join with us in our Zionic alliance of apotheosis. And whether we do, that is what we ought to wish.
Inside the mind of the Book of Mormon’s first antagonist — A review of Mette Harrison’s The Book of Laman
In the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel often come across more as comic book villains more than fully fleshed out characters. As Grant Hardy put it, “In the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel are stock characters, even caricatures.” In her new novel, The Book of Laman (with its cover art a stroke of brilliance), Mette Harrison implicitly poses the question: What might have been going through Laman’s head through all this? What might have led him to act the way he acted? To be clear, this is a work of fiction. Harrison makes no pretense to be doing textual inference; rather, she takes the broad events of First and Second Nephi as given and searches for a credible Laman. Her endeavor reminds me of Geraldine Brooks’s brilliant effort to flesh out David from the Old Testament in The Secret Chord. The Laman that Harrison draws for us is deeply human and relatable. He mostly wants to do right, but he repeatedly fails not in small ways but in disastrous ways (he beat up or tried to kill his brother). She constructs a back story that explains Laman and Lemuel’s ongoing reluctance to trust their father even in the face of Sam and Nephi unwavering confidence. And she plays out what might have happened to Laman and his people after Nephi and his followers left. That time that Laman and Lemuel start beating Nephi in the process of seeking the…
Loosening the iron grip of the King James Version of the Bible?
A couple of years ago, Elder Richard Maynes (of the Presidency of the Seventy) quoted Matthew 13:44 in his conference talk: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” But wait a second! The King James Version of that verse reads differently: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.” Elder Maynes has quoted, instead, the Revised Standard Version. This surprised me because the official version of the Bible used by the Church in English is the King James Version. From the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the KVJ has been preferred (despite Joseph Smith’s corrections). When the Revised Standard Version was released in 1952, an editorial in the Church News stated, “For the Latter-day Saints there can be but one version of the Bible” — the King James Version. J. Reuben Clark published a book in 1956 entitled Why the King James Version. (This is all laid out in Philip Barlow’s Dialogue article.) In 1992, the First Presidency released a statement saying the following, “While other Bible versions may be easier to read than the King James Version, in doctrinal matters latter-day revelation supports…
Reading Nephi – 10:1-10
The first lines go right along with the confusion and different worldview conspicuous in 9. Having just stated the Lord’s intention for Nephi to focus on the spiritual as opposed to the secular and his own confusion over this point, Nephi launches in to tell us about his journey, his reign, and his ministry. It’s all the same to him. It’s all the workings of God. And I Nephi through the first part of II Nephi is in fact about showing that God was behind Nephi’s reign. I wonder what’s behind this notion of a “land of inheritance.” It’s a large theme in scripture. Here, Nephi’s keen on establishing a new land of promise, which becomes a land of inheritance for his people. This plays large later in the Book of Mormon as overzealous nationalists insist on retaking the land of Nephi, which results in disaster. I wonder if it is a part of Nephi’s and later prophets’ focus on being grafted back in to the House of Israel. The prophecies of Lehi concerning the exile and then return of the Jews must have played large in their minds as they themselves distinguished and made sense of their own journey. It wasn’t an exile, it was divine guidance to new promised lands; but the idea of multiple promised lands was brand new, and they were keenly aware of being “broken off” from their people. How would contemporary scholars or prophets…
2016 Gospel Doctrine- Recommended Resources on the Book of Mormon (updated)
As with the Old and New Testaments, here are my suggestions for this year’s study of the Book of Mormon. (Edit for newcomers: Who am I and why do my suggestions have any merit?)
Reading Nephi – 5:1-9
Here is a poignant scene. Reunions are an important trope in all stories, because they’re an important element in all of our lives. As Mormonism’s grand cosmological narrative makes clear, our very life is about separation from our parents and working toward an eventual reunion—after we’ve made our (usually very messy) journey and acted in faith to do the things that we’ve been commanded to do. Verse one gives us a nice twist, however. It’s not that the brothers have completed their quest and come home like every other Odysseus. Rather, they’ve completed their quest and having done so returned to the wilderness. The Book of Mormon is indeed, as Jacob who was born in the wilderness will later state, a story of strangers wandering in the wilderness. Grant Hardy offers a compelling argument that this scene is a matter of artful obfuscation. Nephi distracts his readers from his murder and what was surely an awkward reunion—one can almost hear the irony, imagining Nephi declaring that he has accomplished the commandments of the Lord—by throwing his poor mother under the bus and making the reunion about her own struggles and faithful reconciliation. It’s also hard not to see this as adding insult to injury, given that this is the one time Nephi focuses on a woman’s experience or quotes her (one of three named women). While I agree that Sariah’s experience is being exploited here, I see it as political…
Reading Nephi – Headnote
What would I write now if I were to give an account of some stretch of nine formative years of my life in a paragraph, serving as the key markers of a short bio I’d then write
Reading Nephi – Series Introduction
Reading Genesis
The latest entry in the how-to-read-the-Bible genre is How to Read the Bible (HarperOne, 2015) by Harvey Cox, a Harvard divinity prof who has been around since the sixties (his classic The Secular City was published in 1965). The first chapter is devoted to Genesis. He offers some helpful perspectives to go beyond simply plodding though chapter by chapter, verse by verse, trying to follow what is going on or being said. Here are four approaches to shape one’s reading.
Guest Post- Taking Six Years to Teach the Book of Mormon
This post comes from Mom S. Over the last six years, we’ve had many conversations about the relevant books she was reading, questions that arose, and teaching ideas. I asked her to share some thoughts on this class and its effects. Some time ago, I was asked to teach an adult scripture class in our ward. It was originally an extra activity for the Relief Society sisters but was expanded by the bishop to include any brothers who wanted to attend. I picked the Book of Mormon for the curriculum having learned from personal experience (16 years early morning seminary teacher, 4 years Institute teacher, 3 years stake adult scripture class, etc.), that a serious study of that book changes people.
The Teachings and Doctrine of the Book of Mormon, Take Five
And now we hear from Joe Spencer:
The Teachings and Doctrine of the Book of Mormon, Take Four
Today’s entry was written by Grant Hardy:
The Teachings and Doctrine of the Book of Mormon, Take One
One big change resulting from the new CES and BYU Religious Ed curriculum will be that, instead of two classes on the Book of Mormon, now only one will be required; here is its description: