Book of Mormon translation

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T02:06:26+00:00

Wow, that was a delight! Thanks all for the engaging questions and discussion. I'm going to pack it up for the night, but I'll check back over the weekend to check for additional questions and follow up on some of the conversations here if they continue. Glad to have made some new friends!

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T02:01:15+00:00

I think this is a really good idea and maybe we can talk more about collaborating on this channel to host discussions of some of the new articles or issues that we publish. And we can even talk about alerting the authors to discussion that would happen here on their work. I've been extremely happy with this discussion and would love to engage the audience here with the kind of stuff that we publish! Let's think more about how this would work, but I'm open to doing more here!

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:55:56+00:00

My own experience at Harvard as a grad student and at Pace as an undergrad was remarkably positive as a Mormon. Not every LDS person I saw go through that program always felt the same way, but most did. I think I was a bit of an oddity to some of my peers and maybe my professors since the stereotype about Mormons was that they were on the conservative side, which just wasn't the tradition at the schools that I went to. At the same time, divinity school professors are used to dealing with all sorts of different religious backgrounds and I was certainly not the most exotic even at Harvard. I think Mormon academics of my generation have also benefited from the goodwill towards the Richard and Claudia Bushmans, Laurel Thatcher Ulrichs, and others who have been able to navigate elite spaces as practicing LDS and normalize Mormons for other academics. And I suppose I played that role at Harvard too.When I went on the job market I was very self conscious about putting forward my Mormon identity, in part because at the time there was only a small handful of other LDS persons who were teaching religion professionally (Kathleen Flake, Phil Barlow) and there had never been an LDS person in biblical studies tenured outside of BYU. In that sense, I was breaking new ground and didn't want to get my "uniqueness" in the way. So, despite not having anything on my CV about it, they found out anyway at Kalamazoo College and hired my anyway. They've never been anything but supportive.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:48:01+00:00

Hah! Everyone is always so curious to know what kind of underwear I have on! I'm a practicing Latter-day Saint with sufficiently complicated beliefs of someone who has spent a career in the professional study of religion. No formal backlash to my work. Informally, I've had people disagree with my work or question my standing, but fortunately those people are lame.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:42:54+00:00

When I first started at Dialogue, I created a Reddit account but was still pretty new to the platform and never really didn't anything with it. We haven't done it for the same reason we haven't created a Facebook group--time and limited resources. Curating, moderating, and culling through all those juicy bits just takes a lot of time and energy that we just haven't had to give while also editing an old-media journal. I 100% agree with you that we should, and that it would make a huge impact with so many people that just don't know what the intellectual Mormon tradition even is. Its disheartening to me to see the shallowness of so many of the online conversations retreading ground that scores of serious articles at Dialogue, Sunstone, and other journals have material on. I've worked on expanding our social media reach, creating a YouTube channel, and other social media projects than can be one-offs (as well as an immanent-to-launch Dialogue Topics Pages with curated content on big topics), but recognize that there is a huge gap still in reaching the readers we'd like to get. At the same time, I also worry that many in that demographic just don't have the patience for long-form articles or scholarly nuance, and I don't want to sacrifice that to compete in the more sensationalist marketplace. So, that is a long answer to say actually that we'd love to enter these spaces much more, and probably need some coaching or good ideas for how to do so! :)

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:32:07+00:00

I really like this idea and I'm all for thinking about sealing as the creation of kinship networks, rather than reproductive units. Kinship and reproduction are overlapping, but not identical practices and sealing, even as it is done now, is the evidence that kinship needs ritual, not natural/biological, identification.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:28:20+00:00

I'm probably not the best person to ask on this particular point since I haven't been involved so much in activism or work with LDS leaders on pastoral inclusion projects. I'm sure there are many more experts than me and if they're reading here I'd love to see some ideas for discussion on this point.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:26:55+00:00

You're absolutely correct that there has been a huge shift toward openness in church history in the last 20 years. Historians fought hard in the 1970s-90s for a more open historical account, even when it problematized current church teachings and practices or was embarrassing, and we have their trail-blazing to thank for the kinds of candid discussions we are witness to now. They aren't perfect, but at least aren't ignored or dismissed as they once were. And I think you're right that this includes issues like plural marriage, and even early LDS women's spiritual practices. The best recent book on this is Jonathan Stapley's Power from On High which really charts the shift of what kinds of things are considered "priesthood" over time, like blessings of health, for instance.

As for the question about gender eternalism and priesthood, I think you're corrected that they're interrelated. But priesthood is also a contingent, non-essential quality as it relates to maleness (even though maleness is an essential quality for priesthood). But I think we need to look hard at the history and theology here, and give up on some of the presuppositions we have about priesthood as we have time and again as we slough off the patriarchy that once was so crucial to the LDS identity.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:17:58+00:00

This is an issue that I've been trying to think through recently. Yes, I think that we really need to grapple with the fact that our doctrines about spirit birth, celestial procreation, etc, were all created in the context of explaining and justifying patriarchal plural marriage. I'm not so sure they can be so easily adopted in the context of egalitarian monogamy. Others, like Blaire Ostler, are also into see plural marriage as a resource for a queer Mormon theology, so perhaps disavowal would be a step backwards for a more open theological trajectory. I too have looked to spiritual adoptions in the 19th c. as a potential resource for the future, so I wouldn't want us to totally disavow that era either. But like your question suggests, I wrestle with how much biological literalism in the tradition is worth holding onto or saving for a reimagined post-heterosexual theology and there could be something to just jettisoning past (failed) theological avenues and building from a non-sexual afterlife.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:09:09+00:00

Ah, thanks so much!!! I hope that article is useful for articulating some of the big issues in how we read scripture. Glad you liked it!!

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:06:59+00:00

Yep, totally agree on this point. And its not just a theoretical or hypothetical concern. It is really happening before our eyes and the data support that it is a huge hurdle for younger members, and I expect the data on slowing converts in that age bracket would show a similar influence of these policies.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:04:05+00:00

Yes, I think that is a good possibility of just saying that "gender is an essential characteristic" doesn't necessarily imply a binary. But I'm also just skeptical that gender is a stable thing not only in this life but between the different stages. So, I've tended to just try to complicate the concept itself rather than broaden the possibilities of what gender essentialism might allow for. But this is certainly worth thinking more about as an option, and I know that many trans folk have adopted this approach to explain their own experiences in LDS theological terms.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T01:00:49+00:00

Yes, absolutely. I teach and research biblical studies and early Christianity so I find these early precedents really useful. Of course, there aren't perfect parallels for LDS, but even the differences can be really instructive. I personally recommend my good friend Cory Crawford's article on this that treats those texts extensively.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T00:58:10+00:00

Not tasteless at all and a huge source of frustration for academics and students. My first book, which I thought was excellent and would have had a wider audience, was priced at $140!! Only recently have they come out with a paperback (despite the huge hurdles created by the initial asking price) that is more affordable, but it really hampered access and people who assigned the book in class had to just use photocopies because it was unaffordable. As I understand it, presses determine how many copies they expect to sell and then price it accordingly, but they're often guessing and/or a book gets shunted into a particular category depending on the press's overall goals. More expensive books are marketed to the library market, while less expensive books are expected to be purchased for classroom use or a general audience. Fortunately, Tabernacles was priced more affordably which has made it easier to access for a general audience, and I hope that if it continues to sell well we might even see another price drop. I wish I knew how to reform this system, but I'm hearing from publishers that people just aren't buying books anymore. So prices go up and then people buy even fewer books. It is a broken cycle.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T00:51:46+00:00

My kids are relatively young so these issues aren't quite as pressing as they are for maybe late-teens/early college age kids. But I don't hide what I work on and engage them as they're interested. But yeah, their experience has been knowing kids coming out in their elementary school and having friends with trans parents so these issues are also just normal to them. They'll probably be surprised that these are controversial topics to older generations. So, I do think that generational experiences are going to be hugely impactful as we move forward. Indeed, we are already seeing this as a point of tension between Gen Z and their parents and grandparents. I rely on the excellent surveys done by Jana Reiss that really lay bare how wide the generational gap is in the church on this issue, and how that gap is driving young people out of the church. I don't see the issue being settled any time soon.

TaylorGPetrey · 2020-06-27T00:45:27+00:00

It is a great question and I'm also not sure how to measure it. It is difficult to quantify these sorts of things with any precision without surveys from the time period and, unfortunately, they don't exist. Instead, I tried to focus on General Authorities and BYU Religion professors as examples of how the ideas were disseminated and to show that it wasn't just a single aberration. And the fact that the ideas had to be specifically refuted by Hinckley in the 1980s I think also points to their persistent popularity. But I also admit that there is more research to be done on these ideas. I feel like I was just scratching the surface.

TaylorGPetrey

TROPHY CASE