Best of the Week 5: Academic LDS

Posted on August 12, 2008
Filed Under Religion | 4 Comments

Hey, I’m doing better. It was only a week and a half this time since my last best of. There are a ton this time though. I’ll try breaking them up by theme a bit more.

First up this week saw both the Sunstone and FAIR conferences. We also got word of an upcoming Alma 32 conference. I’ll address conference posts first.

FAIR Conference

Life on Gold Plates did the best conference blogging with writeups on most of the sessions. (I’ll just link to his master page rather than listing all of the sessions) Over at TempleStudy they had a live blogging of the sessions. (Day 2 here) The Fair Blog also had up open threads for day 1 and day 2.

Going by past years, FAIR should put up on their website the speeches from this year’s conference. Although also going by past years it may take a while.

Sunstone Conference

Surprisingly there were far fewer blog posts about Sunstone. There was some metablogging about views of Sunstone at Latter-day Commentary. Even blogs I’d expect to discuss it, like Mormon Matters had little to say. The Sunstone Blog had up a brief recap with links to newspaper stories. BCC had up an open thread on it. T&S had up a discussion that engendered quite a few posts although mainly about some controversy over last year’s Beck talk.

Ancient History and Scripture

Over at the blog Temple Study they have up some parts of a Margaret Barker interview by Bill Hamblin (Part 1 and Part 2 on temple studies, Part 3a and Part 3b on Christmas, Part 4 on environmentalism and the temple, Part 5 on social implications of the temple, Part 6 on seeing the face of God, Part 7a on the location of the temple and Part 7b on the temple in the modern world) I sometimes worry about excessive appeal to Barker by Mormon apologists given that her views are hardly the dominant view in the scholarly community even though they obviously parallel LDS theology in some interesting ways. I wish there were a bit more analysis taking a more critical stance towards her. (Although I know FPR has had a few posts doing that which I’m too lazy to Google right now)

Mormanity had up a nice discussion of Van Damn’s The Urim and Thummim. I’ve been meaning to pick that up for a while. (Although I’ve already blown my book budget for the next month or two) If you’re interested in the topic you should login to JSTOR and read the reviews. A lot of people take exception to some of Van Damn’s theories.

Life on Gold Plates had up a nice discussion of Brant Gardner’s theory of Mormon’s editorial methods in the Book of Mormon. Very interesting.

FAIR blog had up an interesting discussion on reevaluating the apostasy.

Recent History

Ardis at Keepapitchinin always has interesting small vignettes of recent history. Not always that significantly religiously but always interesting. On this last week was an early Arnold Friberg picture.

Sociology, Politics, and the Like

Life on Gold Plates has some followup thoughts on the Bushman conference. Basically some questions about what a “pastoral approach” within academics even means.

Prepare Ye the Way discusses unethical use of students in writing papers. As an aside, I think this actually far more common in most universities than the author seems to admit – Grad Students are often abused in this way. That doesn’t justify it of course.

Juvenile Instructor had up an interesting chart of where the Mormons are in America. It lists counties where Mormons are the #1 religion. There are some surprising ones.

FPR had up a post on the discourse of orthodoxy. That is how the rhetoric works.

Science and Related Topics

Steve at Mormon Organon had up a fascinating post about catching a disease that made him insane. He draws out some very interesting theological questions from this. Well worth reading. Steve also had a funny post on what parts do you believe concerning evolution. It really is an odd question when you step back and think about it.

Theology

Interesting discussion of Lectures on Faith and whether God can have faith at Grace for Grace.

Probably there are a bunch I forgot. If so I apologize in advance. I need to start this post immediately and then just keep adding to it as I notice blog posts. That would probably be more useful. Then I’ll just post it when it reaches a critical mass. C’est la vie.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Best of the Week 5: Academic LDS”

This year I will be making an effort to get transcripts done as soon as possible for the FAIR conference.

You linked the T&S post text to the BCC open thread post — a big disappointment for many readers, no doubt. ;-) Hope you’ll correct it soon.

Thanks for sharing this. This is excellent!

Fixed. Sorry about that.

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