I studied philosophy in college. I enjoyed law school. I work when I can as an appellate lawyer. I read few novels but a lot of philosophy and legal theory. I enjoy the clean, crisp flow of well-honed arguments and get a kind of goofy joy at watching the interplay of concepts and abstraction. By temperament, I am a theorist, but I, alas, live in world where as often as not stories hold sway.<\/p>\n
Despite the valiant efforts of some to impose theoretical structure on our theology, Mormonism is ultimately at the mercy of narrative: stories about the Son of God, prophets, and angels with golden books. The theorizing is generally secondary and post-hoc. To the extent that we have had any serious scholarship or intellectual work done on our religion it has been disproportionately done by historians, and their cadences lurk in the background of virtually all of our discussions. Indeed, even our most intense theological debates get framed in terms of the proper way to structure our historical narratives. Witness the fireworks over the historicity of the Book of Mormon, or the debates of decades past over the New Mormon History.<\/p>\n
Why my suspicion of narrative? Why don’t I simply embrace the fecund ambiguity of stories? In a sense I do. I read the stuff, learn from it, and enjoy it. My love affair with theory has made me suspicion of theory as reductionist and ungrounded — “fried froth” in John Taylor’s uncharitable and striking phrase. On the other hand, I am equally suspicious that narrative all too often backs into vacuousness. Consider history. What is it that historians do? Ultimately, I would argue, they simply tell stories about the past. The sorts of stories that they tell are disciplined by norms about documents and sources but in the end they are weavers of tales, Homers or Miltons hobbled by facts and pedantry. Of course, the historians hope for more. They have ambitions of explanation, but at the end of the day they are not horribly well equipped to offer theories with any real traction as generalizations. Always, we are sucked back to the particularity, to the narrative, and the theory is battered and diminished by demands of the historical moment until we come full circle back to the story. Armed with their insight — “It is the particularity and the historical moment that matter!” — the historians triumphantly march forth, poisoning the well against other modes and ways of understanding until they become almost unimaginable, and Mormon thought becomes confined within the boundaries of the MHA.<\/p>\n
If Plato was wrong about banishing the poets from the well-ordered city, he was at least right to the extent that it ought not to be given over completely and utterly to their care. There must be resistance!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I studied philosophy in college. I enjoyed law school. I work when I can as an appellate lawyer. I read few novels but a lot of philosophy and legal theory. I enjoy the clean, crisp flow of well-honed arguments and get a kind of goofy joy at watching the interplay of concepts and abstraction. By temperament, I am a theorist, but I, alas, live in world where as often as not stories hold sway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}