- Church doctrine is not clear to many members, or they wouldn’t be writing to the General Authorities
- Church doctrine is not fully understood by local leaders, or they wouldn’t need to ask for clarification from the General Authorities

I think where this letter points is that whatever Church leaders say is Church doctrine is Church doctrine. In which case, it can change from time to time, which seems to undermine points 2 and 3 to some extent. This may say something interesting about the relative importance of maintaining institutional authority compared with other uses for “church doctrine”.

I’d lay a bet that were we to take all these doctrinal questions sent the first presidentency we’d find in 90% of the cases the answer ultimately is “we don’t know.”

Obviously, I think that some disciplines are more open to the kind of explicit religious reflection that I am interested in than are other disciplines. Also, for certain disciplines I think that the reflection has to be a very “meta” level before concepts from “church doctrine” have much bite. The problem is that such meta reflection often implicates the fundamental reasons why a particular discipline is desirable, and practioners of a discipline are often the people LEAST interested in these sorts of questions, precisely because the desirablity of the discipline is the starting place of their work, rather than its goal. Try getting a scientist, economist, lawyer or literary theorist to talk about the epistemological or normative foundations of what they do and they are likely to get defensive or confused. “What?!?! You want to revert to myths about nature rather than real knowledge? You think poverty is good? Don’t you know that the rule of law is a great and beautiful thing, or do want the government to exercise arbitrary power? What kind of philistine are you to question the importance of literature?”

I agree that there’s something akin to alchemy in Bushman’s “methodology.” But I don’t know if that makes it less useful than what you propose. After all, how useful is it if, say, an insurance underwriter applies your methodology to think through the foundations of his profession. You don’t have to get too “meta” to realize that insurance is needed only in a fallen world, but what normative implications can one draw from that?

A tangent: Do you know Wayne Booth’s _The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction_? It might be the best attempt I know at applying ethical concepts to some field which might not immediately seem to need them. And though it’s never explicit, in some ways it’s a thoroughly Mormon book. It’s also a wise and seriously underappreciated book, in my not-terribly-humble opinion.

Literary studies, perhaps, is a little more accepting of the “meta” level so I suppose it’s possible to do some interesting work from a Mormon point of view. I just haven’t been able to do it very well so far — although I do have a few vague ideas about why the ending of Bulgakov’s _The Master and Margarita_ from a Mormon perspective .

Of course I’m the overly picky scientist type. I can’t speak to the economist or lawyer. Literary theorists are in a class of their own, so don’t get me started there. (grin)

I was more thinking of literary theorists awareness of their foundations. Even when they utilize philosophical positions, they often get them very, very wrong. (i.e. literary types who read Deconstruction as basically an anything goes relativism) Not all are like this, of course. But enough are that discussions about foundations with literary theorists are always interesting…

It’ll be interesting to see what direction literary studies takes now that the theoretical turn has fizzled out. More literary critics doing bad history? Probably.