Rachael describes tragedy as a situation in which something precious must be lost or given up in the process of securing something else precious, where there is an “irreconcilable conflict between Good and Good,” because both goods cannot be realized. I think she is right that tragedy in this sense is an essential element of Mormon cosmology, and that this role for tragedy is part of what makes Mormonism a radical departure from traditional Christianity.

Perhaps the most important tragedy is that in order to develop spiritually and fully partake of the glory of our Father in Heaven, we have to enter a realm of spiritual uncertainty, ignorance and weakness, and exercise moral agency in a context where grave sin is possible. As a result, many of us will depart from the path of salvation, perhaps permanently. This is a deeply non-traditional view in a few ways, and perhaps what is most non-traditional about it is its incorporation of tragedy–indeed, multiple dimensions of tragedy.

First, the idea that there is something good that Adam and Eve achieve through the Fall, and that we achieve in following them, is an uneasy idea in conventional Christianity. That we must give up innocence and the presence of God in order to achieve spiritual progress is itself a tragic notion. Second, the idea that to allow spiritual progress and the choice of exaltation, God must also open up the possibility of our choosing eternal damnation, and that some will almost certainly choose it, is tragic. Third, some traditional accounts, like that of Augustine, suggest that God’s plan is equally realized whether we are saved or damned, because when we are saved it reflects his mercy (and our purification from sin in some sense), and when we are damned it reflects his justice (and our guilt). However, in the Mormon view, the punishment of the wicked is something that is not in any way pleasing to God. He weeps for those whom Satan claims. Hence God’s justice is also tragic. God’s plan is shot through with tragedy in (at least) these three key ways.

I agree with Rachael about Mormons’ tendency (often) to avoid and deny tragedy, rather than face and deal with it. It is understandable that we do this, given human nature, the tendency of historical Christianity (which is always there as a cultural influence) to avoid tragedy, and the presence of other teachings in Mormonism that facilitate the avoidance of tragedy, depending on how they are interpreted. It is paradoxical, though, given how thoroughly tragic our cosmology is, and ultimately I think we are unfaithful to our prophetic inheritance if we do not take to heart the tragic dimensions of our theology. Thus far I fully agree with Rachael, though I have expanded on her themes in some ways of my own.

Rachael loses me, though, when she offers some doctrinal solutions to help us “handle tragedy without compromising Mormonism’s profound commitment to joy.” I think there is something promising here, but I am not sure how it is supposed to work, and I worry that her solutions might involve eliminating tragedy rather than accepting and dealing with it. Like some others who comment on her thread, I’d love to see her clarify what she has in mind and am looking forward to her promised sequel. For now, I’ll explain where my questions lie.

First Rachael points to the idea that our experiences, including suffering, will turn to our good. Certainly this is a key part of the Mormon picture, and part of why we must, tragically, spend time in mortality, away from God. But if our suffering all turns to our good, do we risk nullifying the suffering? I especially worry that we are thinking tragedy will ultimately be done away, like death will be, and if that is what we think, it seems we are ultimately not accepting it. I am particularly nervous about the way LDS sometimes seem to brush off the idea that there was something wrong with Adam’s and Eve’s choice to eat the forbidden fruit, which made experience of good and evil possible, and instead simply describe it as the right choice. Even as Nephi is explaining why it was necessary, he still calls it a transgression. If we make their choice too wholly and simply good, I think we are missing something and again, talking ourselves out of tragedy.

Next, Rachael points to the hope for universal salvation. This is certainly a reassuring idea. It makes the tragedy of leaving the presence of God and enduring ignorance and sin more acceptable. Yet isn’t it a bit too reassuring? If we maintain universal salvation, aren’t we still minimizing the possibility of another, very important tragedy? To me, there is a big difference between saying that God wants and hopes for and seeks salvation for all, and saying that he will succeed. I suppose there is an element of tragedy left so long as some people take a long time, and both suffer and inflict a lot of pain along the way before coming around to accept salvation. Still, the depth of the tragedy is drastically reduced. It becomes ephemeral, from an eternal standpoint, and so I worry that we are talking ourselves out of tragedy.

Also, I just wonder if we aren’t kidding ourselves to paint the rosy picture of universal salvation. In scripture I see God expressing the hope for all to be saved, a hope that applies to each of us, but not in any clear way the teaching that all actually will be saved. Moreover, the hope, for me, is part of the tragedy, so I affirm the hope . . . but I am not sure that my hope will be fulfilled, and if I were, I’m not sure it would still be hope! A lot of the urgency of the hope would seem to dissipate, and along with it, the sense of tragedy.

Finally, Rachael refers to the response of weeping in love, exemplified by Mormon and Enoch, and by God. I’m not sure how she means this to resolve the tension between tragedy and joy exactly, either. I am hoping she will write more. To me, though, this is the most important and, if I understand it, insightful part of her post.

It seems to me that one of the conclusions we must draw from a tragic conception of the universe is that sorrow is inevitable, and hence that we should not try to avoid it. This is not to say that we should not avoid it in any way. There are many things that lead to unnecessary sorrow, and we should avoid these as far as we can. Also, some things are not as sorrowful as we may think, when understood in eternal perspective, and we should avail ourselves of the comfort of that perspective where appropriate. Still, we should not expect or try to avoid sorrow entirely, and in fact, we should expect an enormous amount of sorrow if we follow in God’s footsteps. Perhaps we should even expect infinite sorrow, accompanying, though not surpassing the infinite joy of exaltation and reunion with God.

The trick is to accept that sorrow for some things is good and right, and part of the divine life. If loss is inevitable, it is only right that we should feel sorrow. Sorrow does not indicate a lack of faith in God’s plan, or a failure to appreciate his perspective. In fact, God himself feels enormous sorrow over the suffering of his children, especially their suffering due to sin, including their own sins. Proper sorrow, I suggest, is not opposed to joy, but is an element of it.

Part of a faithful response to God’s plan, then, is to accept the sorrow that comes from appreciating and seeing its tragic dimensions. Rather than fighting it, as Enoch initially seems to do, we should recognize that certain kinds of sorrow are part of holiness, and that in allowing this sorrow to wash over and through us, by weeping with God, we become more pure and grow closer to—not bliss, perhaps, but—the serenity and joy of heaven.

It is disturbing to find that one of the most popular teachers at BYU has been continuing to teach ugly ideas that were denounced from the highest levels of the church decades ago. Thousands of students have listened to his lectures. This is an institutional failure, not merely a failure in one man’s judgment. There must be some way to keep this sort of thing from happening.

BYU functions effectively as an arm of the LDS church. What BYU professors teach in their classrooms is seen, reasonably enough, as carrying a degree of church authority, both within the university and beyond it. It is vital that this authority be used in ways that lead students (and other church members) to truth rather than error.

It seems to me the Bott case is strong evidence that BYU’s approach to religious education needs revamping. Obviously Bott is just one professor out of over 70 full-time Religious Education faculty. However, his case is so far out of line, and evidently has been so far out of line for so many years, that it raises serious questions about the quality control mechanisms in place.

The two primary quality-control mechanisms in higher education generally are training and peer review. Faculty are normally required to hold a terminal degree in the area they will be teaching. This assures that they start off with essential skills and knowledge. However, this is only the beginning. Faculty are expected to continue to learn and develop over the course of their careers, and they need ongoing quality control, which occurs primarily through peer review.

Now, when I say “peer review,” this may sound strange because it is uncommon at most universities for faculty to sit in on each other’s classes. While there really should be more direct peer review of teaching, too (and not just at BYU), what I am primarily referring to is peer review of faculty scholarship and other professional activity that leads faculty to engage with their peers.

Peer review works because many heads are better than one. Individuals are free to develop creative, even speculative ideas, but their ideas are given little weight unless and until they have been submitted to the peer review process. Scholars present their ideas at conferences, where they hear responses and are expected to answer questions. Work is published only after receiving positive reviews from some of the more reputable participants. Even then, other published responses serve to highlight strengths and weaknesses. Published work is open to refutation by anyone who knows better. This process weeds out the lowest quality work right away, and works with what is of medium quality to refine it. There are sure to be many small missteps along the way, but the peer review process allows obvious errors to be corrected relatively quickly. Critical interaction with peers in this manner also teaches habits of modesty, humility, and care. Scholars learn to distinguish what is tentative or tenuous in their thinking from what is secure.

On matters of doctrinal orthodoxy in a revelatory church, one might be tempted to look at more top-down approaches to quality control. However, these can never take the place of peer-to-peer approaches in an academic context. There is too much going on in a university for top-down regulation to do more than set up a broad space in which faculty and students operate. Learning and inquiry will inevitably raise all manner of questions on which there is no definite answer coming from above. Just as importantly, even on those questions where there is a clear norm from above, only a peer-to-peer process has the bandwidth to keep an academic operation on track.

The peer review process is ideally suited both to an academic environment, where academic freedom is so important for learning and growth, and to a gospel environment, where all are expected to pursue the truth by study, by faith, and by the Holy Spirit, and all are called to do much good “of their own free will” (D&C 58: 27). There is far too much to be done in the process of learning, as in the building of God’s kingdom generally, for us to wait around to be commanded in all things. Rather, the key to success is to set up a culture of good judgment and mutual support and correction. The power of this de-centralized approach is visible in any healthy ward and is arguably one of the chief strengths of the Restored Church, grounded in its doctrines and its inspired organizational principles.

The peer review process serves as quality control for teaching as well as scholarship for a few reasons. First, it works because the products of scholarship serve as the primary sources for teaching. While individual professors offer commentary of various kinds as they teach, the main substance of their courses should derive from texts that have gone through the testing and refinement of peer review.

Second, teaching requires faculty to exercise creativity and personal initiative in both their methods of teaching and in the ideas they present to students. To present material in a way that addresses the needs and questions of students routinely requires faculty to use independent judgment, going beyond what is already established in a textbook. To do this well requires the same skills needed in scholarship. Hence a program that hopes for quality teaching must plan for these skills to be built and maintained through professors’ ongoing involvement in scholarship.

While teaching students, who are less knowledgeable and want to please the professor, it is easy for appropriate creativity and independence over time to drift into overconfidence and complacency, even into irresponsible speculation or self-indulgence. Peer review teaches modesty, forces professors to keep doing their homework, and keeps them informed about the best material available, as well as maintaining their skills and judgment. This is why it is standard at reputable institutions to require professors to be active in scholarship on the subjects they teach, including the peer review process.

Unfortunately, neither of these mechanisms are at work in BYU Religious Education in the way they are in other departments at BYU, or in most any department at other universities of comparable stature.

First I’ll comment on the situation with regard to training. There is no such thing as a graduate degree in Mormon Theology or Mormon Scripture, so BYU Religion faculty tend to hold PhDs in other areas that may have little relevance to the content of the courses they teach. In my brief sampling, quite a few actually held PhDs from other departments at BYU, such as Education or Family Science.

In the near term, there are limits to what BYU can do about the lack of standard training, since it probably would not be practical to send many current faculty back to school. In the medium- to long-term, BYU should be working hard to hire faculty with training that is as relevant as can be. Biblical studies, religious history, and theology, even if it is not Mormon theology, should be high on their list of preferred academic backgrounds. In the study of the Bible in particular, it is not clear that a sound program custom designed to prepare BYU faculty would be very different from many existing programs in Biblical Studies at other universities, and many of the skills taught in these programs should transfer well to the study of distinctively Mormon scripture, whether ancient or modern. There are certainly some ways in which Mormons will interpret the Bible differently from non-Mormons, but a diversity of interpretations, reflecting both individual and denominational differences, is normal in an academic program.

In the long run, BYU should be thinking about ways to fill in the gaps in available training with regard to their needs. Considering that it has a law school and many other graduate programs, it is rather strange that BYU does not have at least a master’s program in distinctively LDS scripture and theology. Of course, to offer a worthwhile graduate program would require high quality faculty and robust quality control processes for those faculty, so there are other issues to address first.

Precisely because the foundation of initial training is often missing, however, BYU should be exercising the method of peer review that much more vigorously, and that means requiring faculty to be active in scholarship. Administrators who are far from both scholarship and teaching may see scholarship as a distraction from teaching, but in my view the benefits of scholarship for teaching are greater than the benefits for scholarship!

Think of it this way: in any serious college class, students are required to write papers or lab reports, or to engage in sustained projects (artistic performance, etc.) that are self-directed to a significant extent. In many subjects, especially in the humanities and social sciences, writing is essential to the learning process. Without sustained, independent work on selected aspects of the course material, students’ understanding will remain shallow, and their minds will remain passive. All of this is common-sensical enough. Hence though we may not think of it, it should be no surprise that the same is true for teachers. Scholarship is homework for professors.

In principle, of course, professors have already done some homework on the subject, during their graduate programs, particularly in writing a dissertation. However, having had an active relationship with the material long ago is very different from having an active engagement with it in the present, and if faculty do not grow beyond the levels they achieve as graduate students, they will fall far below their potential. Course design can also become a creative process in itself. However, unless one receives lively, in-depth feedback from peers on one’s course designs, in a manner that engages their content, it will not serve the same purpose. In the great majority of cases, professors need to remain active in scholarship and present it to their peers for discussion in order to sustain and update their expertise.

Schools where professors are not expected to be actively engaged in peer-reviewed scholarship on a regular basis can be viable when there exists a robust scholarly discussion elsewhere, supported by participants at other institutions, which provides sound course material. A physics teacher at a community college need not conduct cutting-edge research herself to have reliable textbooks, and one can hope that her graduate training in a more research-oriented university has taught her to recognize what is reliable in her field, and what is not. Teaching undergraduates in areas of settled science, it is not difficult for her to retain mastery of her course material.

These conditions do not apply to BYU’s School of Religious Education, however. There is not a robust scholarly discourse on Mormon subjects anywhere, let alone one going on independent of BYU. There is not an established academic literature on which to base Religious Education courses. There are some valuable works and forums around and a few quite interesting scholars at work on this or that issue, but nothing resembling the firm basis of scholarship presupposed in other academic disciplines. Religious Education stands to benefit significantly from a broader field of non-Mormon scholarship on some aspects of its work, but on any distinctively Mormon questions, other than some aspects of history, the scholarship is scattered and immature. As high as the quality of some work may be, little of it has been tested in the manner that is routine in established disciplines. And as long as BYU continues to be the main place where Mormonism is taught in an academic setting, but does not support and expect its faculty to engage in a robust scholarly discourse on Mormon topics, the body of scholarship on Mormon questions will remain somewhat patchy and immature, despite the admirable work of some scholars.

If the quality of religious education at BYU is to be established and maintained at a high level, then, it is vital for the School of Religious Education to increase the involvement of its faculty in peer-reviewed scholarship.

The notion of an apostasy from the primitive gospel and the original church has been a key animating feature in Mormonism since its inception and in other “religions of the book.” However, the concept of apostasy has proven to be tremendously fluid, with individual, institutional, communal, and historical meanings and applications all proliferating in religious thought throughout the ages. Fifteen faithful Mormon scholars from many scholarly backgrounds and methodologies will explore the concept of apostasy in various historical and religious contexts as we consider how to narrate apostasy in ways that remain historically authentic and cohere with Mormon theology.

The conference schedule and location information are available at the conference website.

The conference is organized by Miranda Wilcox, Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, with financial assistance from an Eliza R. Snow Faculty Grant.

—posted on behalf of the conference organizer, Miranda Wilcox.

Here is the quotation that caught my attention:

I have always considered America — a smaller version of our world — as a grand “testing ground” for the entire human population on earth. It is a testing ground where diverse peoples coexist, cooperate and create innovation. If this experiment succeeds in America, there is hope that mankind may succeed on a global scale. If it fails, mankind can expect no bright future. America exemplifies the future of mankind.

While there is a lot more to the phenomenon of America than this, I think Mr. Miyamoto is right that, (the United States of) America,* with its immigrants from everywhere, is a kind of crucible in which people from all over the world will either find constructive ways of living and working together, or not. It represents in microcosm the challenges of the world as a whole.

One limitation of America, of course, is that it is far from clear how well solutions achieved there can be brought back out into the wider world scene. Those who live in America are changed by the experience, and so what comes to work for them may not work for their relatives and countrymen back home. Equally, institutions, conditions, and habits that enable and support harmony in the U.S. may not be very portable. The very success of the American experiment to a great extend depends on and also encourages people coming and staying. To the extent that American immigrants function as representatives of their societies of origin, it is a real limitation if they tend not to go back. Hence if, as Mr. Miyamoto says, ‘what we are seeking to create is a “global civilization” for the entire world,’ then we will need some other strategies.

One such strategy may be an institution like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an institution that functions at a global level, including members from all over the world, which builds ties among them even while they continue to live in the lands and societies of their birth. One of the most effective tools uniting this multicultural church is the missionary program, which takes young men and women from around the world and sends them to live in places far from home for 1.5 to 2 years, often learning another language to do so.

There is perhaps no better way to build bonds of affection than to serve, and missionaries return expressing a love for the people they lived among that may run deeper than their love of their home community. Equally importantly, the missionary program creates a cadre of members, future leaders, who between them have intimate knowledge of loyalty to a great range of cultures and societies. Thus even while at the highest levels the church continues for now to be led predominantly by Americans (for reasons of history, economics, or whatever), these are Americans who with each passing year are more familiar with and tied to their brothers and sisters around the world. It is, of course, important also to see more and more leaders of international origin, many of whom have served international missions themselves. While missionaries go abroad to spread their faith, if we want to build a world in which we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, the knowledge and affection they bring home will be equally vital.

America is a place that provokes people to work for unity, independent of religion. A global religion provokes people to work for unity, independent of place. It will take a lot more than these two phenomena to create Mr. Miyamoto’s “bright future”, but it’s a start.

*Having grown up outside the U.S., I am very aware that the word America refers to two whole continents, including much more than the U.S.A. Since I am using Mr. Miyamoto’s article as a jumping-off point, however, I will defer to his usage for the moment and use “America” as shorthand for the United States thereof.

At the January 2012 meeting of the American Society for Church History, I’ll be on a panel called “Teaching Mormonism in a Digital Age.” In my comments I’ll be considering the impact of the “bloggernacle” on Mormon studies, specifically in regard to the current generation of graduate students. I have designed the following questionnaire to get a better handle on why people read Mormon blogs and what they get out of them. The questionnaire is for any graduate student, full or part time, LDS or non-LDS, in any academic field. The informed consent form on the first page will explain more, or you can contact me at patrick.mason@cgu.edu with any questions. Thanks for participating.

To participate in the study, follow this link to the questionnaire. The questionnaire will open in your browser as a Google Document, and is submitted automatically when you click “Submit” at the end.

The Super Committee’s lame punt is just the most recent sign of the overall trend, though: at an institutional level, we haven’t even really admitted there is a problem, let alone started repenting. What do we need to repent of? Oh, there are plenty of things seriously wrong with the way we run our economy, including many of the favorite criticisms from both the right and the left, and the economy feeds into a lot of other things that are wrong with our society.

I’ll just mention debt for now. We borrowed like mad for the past fifteen years or so, on houses, credit cards, student loans, and government programs, and called it prosperity—short-sighted materialism (among other things), masked and rationalized with convenient economic pseudo-theory. I was getting nervous about this back around 1999, but by now a lot of readers will probably grant it to me, though there are plenty of theorists and politicians who say our problem is still that we need to spend more.

So if you’ll grant me that this self-deceptive over-spending is a pernicious vice, isn’t my schadenfreude still wrong? Jesus said that those who don’t forgive are guilty of the greater sin, and one of the most important and revolutionary insights of the Restoration is that God does not rejoice, but actually weeps over the suffering of the wicked, so I should too. I’m sorry, though, it’s hard for me to see the Dow at a little over 11,000 as an unbearable affliction. This is not like a war. It’s not even a famine, let alone a flood. It is certainly not the fire from the sky that Jonah was hoping for, and it might even save some of us from a longer-lasting fire. It just might be enough of a discomfort to make us re-think our priorities, and we are long over-due for rethinking.

Instead of Jonah, let’s look at Nephi, who prayed, “O Lord, do not suffer that this people shall be destroyed by the sword; but O Lord, rather let there be a famine in the land, to stir them up in remembrance of the Lord their God, and perhaps they will repent and turn unto thee” (Helaman 11:4).

This economic sand trap is a serious problem for some folks, no question, but it is mild in comparison with a famine. Moreover, the Dow isn’t even the economy. A decent amount of wealth, at least in the abstract, is bound up in the stock market numbers, but they change too fast for us to take them seriously as wealth, full stop. More than anything, the stock market is a barometer of where we think the economy is going, and so when it goes down, it isn’t so much a problem itself as the recognition and publicizing of a problem.

So, I’m excited that we are admitting to ourselves, in an implicit, confused way, that we have a serious problem, or at least that for the reluctant there is a highly public indication that there may be one. I’ll be more excited when I see people recognizing what we need to actually change. Will we as a nation actually turn back to God? That might be a bit much to hope for, but perhaps we will at least be less enamored with our idols of gold and silver, and some of our destructive ideas. Maybe we will stop seeing the stock market as quite such an important indicator of our wealth, because we will see that our real treasures are elsewhere.

Actually, I would be happy for more of us to just do the math, and there are signs that this, at least, is happening: credit card debt went down 11% from October 2010 to October 2011! Hurray! Some of us at an individual level, at least enough to affect the average, have started to change our ways.

Rosalynde suggests that Grant Hardy’s literary analysis of the Book of Mormon is harder to separate from a discussion of its historical origins than he thinks. He shows us the complexity, coherence, and development of its various narrative voices, and in the process shows how much their distinctive, personal perspectives and interests shape the text. Hardy invites readers of the Book of Mormon to set aside questions of historicity, at least for the moment, and explore literary features like these which are interesting in their own right. Yet in Rosalynde’s view the literary character that Hardy finds ironically indicates something itself about the book’s historicity. If we attend to “the history of the narrative genre,” we see that even at the time of a relatively modern work such as Don Quixote, “the romance had not yet become the novel, the author had not yet entirely separated from the narrator, and indeed the human being had not yet become the modern subject comfortably at home in its fully-furnished mental interior.”

Hence in Rosalynde’s view, the very complexity of the narrator’s personalities, and the degree to which their voices are visible in the text, mark it as a distinctively modern book, much more modern even than Don Quixote, at least in this respect. In the comments she suggests that the Book of Mormon still need not be entirely modern in its origins; perhaps these modern characteristics enter the text through a process of interpretation as (modern) Joseph Smith tries to convey authentically ancient content. However, one must “recognize a modern context at some level,” and presumably one whose influence on the text is roughly as deep and pervasive as the influence of these complex, developed narrative voices that Hardy describes.

First I want to thank Rosalynde for such an interesting, creative, and unexpected angle on the question of Book of Mormon historicity. This is an exciting question to explore, if only because it calls out such interesting questions about the literary character of the Book of Mormon and indeed the entire history of writing. I am quite interested in both the historicity and the literary character of the Book of Mormon myself, and find it very exciting to think about how they might be related. Further, if Rosalynde’s view of the history of literature were accurate, her point would seem to carry great weight.

That said, I disagree rather thoroughly. I think Rosalynde greatly overestimates how far the sort of subjectivity and personal voice displayed in the Book of Mormon is distinctively modern. I am inclined to agree that the Pentateuch takes a very different tone than most of the Book of Mormon, as do many other portions of the Bible, and there may be a trend across history for books to be less personal in the ancient world. My impression is that the history of literature is simply less linear than Rosalynde suggests. However, if there is a trend corresponding to the emergence of modernity, it is a trend in how many books have this personal tone, not in whether there are books with a highly developed narrative subject such as we see in the Book of Mormon.

Several examples spring to mind of ancient writings in which the complexity and pathos of the author’s subjective experience come through quite vividly: Augustine’s Confessions, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and many of the Psalms, for example. Julie Smith similarly calls our attention to the rather existential Ezekiel.

Plato’s writings also develop some really stunning portraits of characters and narrators, explicitly and implicitly, especially of Socrates. The Phaedo is one of the most illustrative. In it, Socrates offers a sustained, elaborate defense of his view that the soul is eternal, but interrupts it with disarmingly frank comments on his relationships with his interlocutors, on how they may feel about what he is saying and vice versa, and about his own feelings on the subject he is discussing. The conversation itself clearly arises in response to the emotionally loaded situation in which Socrates and his friends and family find themselves. More than once Socrates directly calls into question his own motives for presenting such an argument when he is about to be executed. As author of the dialogue, Plato clearly shows a rich appreciation for human subjectivity, including the way our perceptions and judgments are often shaped by our interests and emotions, both overtly and covertly. In fact, there are times when the quintessentially modern Kierkegaard, a contemporary of Joseph Smith, is clearly and self-consciously channelling Plato.

Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, though it was written a few centuries after Moroni, is also interesting to consider on this point, as are some of the Buddhist scriptural texts and the Chinese Zhuangzi, which date from a similar period. The Buddhist texts I have read (from the Pali Canon) do not necessarily display the inner depths of an individual author as such, but they display an incredibly rich appreciation for the complexities and quirks of human subjective experience. Even in some of the more historically oriented books of the Bible, now and then we get surprisingly personal glimpses into the struggles of heroes like Gideon, Saul, Elijah, and Abraham. The writings of Paul in the New Testament were presumably written before the time of Mormon and Moroni, but display deep, sustained, and poignant introspection.

I think it is fascinating to consider how well developed the personal voices of the Book of Mormon narrators are, and what this might indicate about both the meaning and origins of the text. Rosalynde suggests, though, that the “fully-furnished mental interior[s]” of the Book of Mormon’s narrators are the sort of thing that only turns up in modern texts. It would not surprise me if something like her view of the history of literature is true within certain periods and regions. However, based on my own reading of ancient texts, especially those I’ve mentioned, at the scale relevant for evaluating the Book of Mormon, her view of history does not hold up. Some of the most complex, cohesive, subtle, and moving explorations and expressions of the individual person as subject come from the ancient world, in and around the time of the Book of Mormon.

Morning Session

Afternoon Session

A PDF version of the program is also available.