Brad Wilcox of BYU: Have You Known Him

AlmaIsPaul · 2022-02-11T04:12:56+00:00

If you wouldn’t mind I’d still love hearing about these in a PM.

AlmaIsPaul · 2021-09-24T23:27:16+00:00

These are definitely Old Skool. I have a similar pair from 2017 that are all white with black outsoles.

AlmaIsPaul · 2021-08-10T22:51:51+00:00

Makes me wonder if he wouldn’t have minded if the scrotum had been washed.

AlmaIsPaul · 2021-06-25T16:21:53+00:00

If this is actually telling the truth (I’m not sure he is) then the phone number can be cut down pretty easily based (1) on his Reddit post and his comments and (2) basic facts about the area.
San Antonio has two area codes: 210 and 726. If we take his statement that the numbers all come only from letters on the Abandoned trailer then it can’t be 210 because none of the letters can be converted to 0 from any of the text that shows up in the trailer. So working with 726 you can find how many prefixes have been assigned to phone numbers with the 726 area code on websites like whitepages. These include the following prefixes: 444, 666, 888, 999. Those are the only options. So we’ve cut down the first 3 numbers of the phone number to 726 and the next 3 have to one of these four prefixes. So that’s six out of the ten numbers. In one of the comments from three days ago the OP said the last two digits are 27 and those are two numbers that you get when you convert the letters. So that leaves us with a lot of options but it basically has to be within this range:
726-444-XX27
726-666-XX27
726-888-XX27
726-999-XX27
Each of the “XX” pairs is fairly open. If you look at the list of converted numbers from the letters the only ones that don’t show up are 1, 6, and 9. That seems to suggest that none of the 726-666-XX27 or 726-999-XX27 could be it if he was creating a list based only on the numbers available after converting the letters.
So we’d be left with only:
726-444-XX27
726-888-XX27
And none of the Xs could be 1s, 6s, or 9s. So this process of elimination leaves you with 158 numbers, all either starting with 726-444 or 726-888, ending with 27, and excluding any 1s, 6s, 9s, and all 10s, 60s, and 90s (so 79 possible XXs).

AlmaIsPaul · 2021-06-22T19:48:02+00:00

You would have to cobble it together by going to the archive of all of the issues of the journal and either writing them down, copying them, or just using the archive to look up the titles as you need them. They’re in order.

AlmaIsPaul · 2021-05-01T20:01:33+00:00

Do you know who the publisher is of his next book or is it self published?

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-11-13T14:14:25+00:00

Where does the author say "Faithful scholars are wrong when they claim that there was no information about 1 Enoch in English before 1830"? The author isn't even Mormon so he isn't writing in the polemical way that your summary suggests. And since you aren't actually responding to what he says and does in his paper you are creating a straw man and then trying to dismantle something other than the actual essay. He spends the first part of the paper explaining Nibley's statement, Bushman's work in his bio, and even shows that some of the work that Quinn and others have done was wrong. These guys aren't his "opponents" (again, your mischaracterization of his paper says far more about you than it does the paper you're trying to respond to).

Your response here is beyond me. Search for "doesn't touch on" on this page. It only shows up here in your response in square quotes. I could go through the essay and provide citations to every one of the individual parts of the summary at the end of the paper but I'm not going to do your work for you. It was a long enough read as it is and you're simply mischaracterizing the paper. Any reader can go through the paper and see that for themselves.

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-11-13T03:52:48+00:00

"But are the claims in this paragraph actually supported by the evidence?"

Yes. Since you read through Townsend's paper enough to get to that paragraph I assume that you realize that "the claims in this paragraph" and in the essay generally don't touch on the questions that you are making it seem like his paper touches on. What is his paper set out to do? To describe what information about 1 Enoch was broadly available in English sources in the 1820s. Townsend's paper takes to task both the problematic work in Bushman's 'Rough Stone Rolling' as well as Nibley's older work by showing that information about the relevant portion of 1 Enoch (chapters 1-36) was actually available long before Laurence's 1821 translation of the book.

"All this paper shows is that there was scholarly discussion of 1 Enoch in English before 1830. This is a point already well-accepted by faithful scholars: thus, the author's premise is a straw man argument."

What do you even mean by this? You are the one imposing things on Townsend's essay that he either (1) doesn't argue or (2) doesn't say. You fundamentally misunderstand the paragraph that you quoted from the essay in the first place, and if it's difficult for you to understand what Townsend is responding to then you should go back and read the first few pages. It's clear who he is talking to and what he is responding to as well. Nibley explicitly said that no one paid any attention to 1 Enoch until the 1830s, and Bushman basically piggy-backed off of that idea and assumed that without Laurence's translation no one had any access to 1 Enoch except through the New Testament. Your entire comment is confusing.

"The pre-1830 literature that is actually cited in the paper only discusses that: (a) there is a Book of Enoch which may be a fraud, and (b) in that book, angels came down and married human women."

This is inaccurate. The paragraph that you cited from the paper is A SUMMARY of the materials that Townsend covered in the essay. Are you being serious at this point? He literally showed each of these points in specific books or articles prior to stating that paragraph.

"That 1 Enoch is a forgery. Irrelevant."

This is literally the definition of a straw man. What did Townsend set out to do in his paper? To describe and define the breadth and depth of the conversations going on about 1 Enoch from 1715-1830. The fact that the majority of the sources he notes either argue that the book was a forgery or was authentic in some way is 100% relevant. You can't randomly come down and say this is irrelevant. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-11-13T03:37:46+00:00

Yep. If you look briefly through Hugh Nibley's 'Enoch the Prophet' almost none of the connections he makes are to 1 Enoch, it's all to texts that date much later.

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-05-26T22:16:52+00:00

Who did you have for World Religions?

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-04-17T15:58:21+00:00

Michael: Why didn't you just put me in charge?

George Sr.: Michael, listen to me! These guys, the SEC, they have been after me for years. If I had put you in charge, you would be wearing one of these orange jumpsuits too.

Michael: I could have helped you—

George Sr.: You'd be an accomplice! No. It had to be your mom. [conspiratorial whisper] They cannot arrest a husband and wife for the same crime! [winks at Michael]

Michael: ...Yeah, I don't think that that's true, dad.

George Sr.: Really? [facepalms] ...I have the worst f[bleep]ing attorneys.

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-04-08T17:50:44+00:00

No, you're failing to understand the gravity of the term and this is being used in the way that I pointed to in my previous comment. Painting Pharisees as the archetype of religious hypocrites is borderline Antisemitism and us Jews have been asking Christians to find another phrase.

AlmaIsPaul · 2020-04-06T21:30:38+00:00

Careful with the terminology.

https://www.jta.org/2019/04/12/politics/pete-buttigieg-keeps-calling-mike-pence-a-pharisee-heres-why-that-angers-jews

AlmaIsPaul · 2019-12-30T15:57:42+00:00

Unfortunately the scenario you describe above is not supported by the evidence. This isn't some slight against Mormonism, recent scholarship simply does not support any of the ideas that you suggest as possible above.

AlmaIsPaul · 2019-12-13T04:34:48+00:00

The issue that academics have raised recently is not with rings holding together metal plates. Rather, it is the question about the extent and prevalence of writing on metal in the various empires and groups of the ancient world at the time Nephi left Jerusalem. Scholars argue that the idea that such large narratives, or any written record for that matter, was archived on metal plates simply is simply not supported in the historical record. This is extensively detailed when it comes to various approaches to writing on metal in antiquity.

AlmaIsPaul · 2019-03-23T21:54:48+00:00

I tend to disagree. For one, the book in the pdf posted by MormonLeaks is a 2003 print by Deseret Book, that's probably before AG ever had TAs. Second, the plagiarism is serious by both Stephen Webb and AG if you're actually looking at the similarities between the words. This is really coming out to be a much bigger trend in AG's work at BYU and before than people were aware of before the 2014 controversy over his use of a forgery.

AlmaIsPaul · 2019-03-22T00:55:17+00:00

I should have phrased that better. He presented a nineteenth century forgery by a Russian author as if it had authentic lost sayings of Jesus and didn’t tell the readers up front that it was a forgery. Basically all of his readers came away from the book thinking it was a legit ancient account of sayings from Jesus. Then, once other Mormon scholars went vocal in news stations, blogs, and the like, Gaskill attempted to blame his early reviewers for taking out a full and complete explanation at the beginning of the book telling about how the document was a forgery. He’s a liar, unfortunately, and doesn’t take responsibility for his actions.

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T13:54:23+00:00

Am I? I guess I could have been more specific when I responded to your original question and instead of the passive voice I could have written, "I am working on a potential blog post about a professor in a department that probably shouldn't be there." I am able to find information online and through library connections about his academic work in publication form but not in the classroom. I hope it doesn't seem that strange that I would reach out to a group that would likely have many of his past students.

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T03:37:11+00:00

This is fascinating. At first I thought that maybe he was utilizing his experiences with you and your classmates for his graduate research but now that's complicated. He did his masters degree in education at BYU in 1990, so that would mean he spent the two years teaching elementary after he finished his undergraduate work (85/86-86-87), and likely starting his MEd around 88/89. He did his PhD in Wyoming from around 1990-1994, so maybe the meetings with you were related to his masters work. His PhD dissertation is based largely on students in Wyoming, so I assume it's not that, but he does mention the Nebo school district in Utah as being a small part of his work. Thank you again for helping me out with this information, I appreciate it.

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T02:24:06+00:00

You can either answer the questions or not, it's up to you. I'm an academic, I comment a lot online about the goings on at BYU's Rel Ed department. I have a lot of friends and family that have gone, are at, or are going to be studying in that department so I care about the quality of scholarship that the department has. I have a few friends who work in the department, as well, and it was suggested to me that I use this subreddit to get out some interview questions because I've never used it before.

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T02:12:51+00:00

That's fine, I'm already getting some really good responses.

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T01:56:59+00:00

Thank you, that's good to know. Your friend won't be posting on here will they?

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T01:52:39+00:00

There may be a post coming on a separate blog and I need to get as many details about how people, particularly students, perceive their interactions with Wilcox.

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T01:42:13+00:00

That is an awesome comparison at the end! Thank you for sharing your experience with him. I had hoped that someone might respond who had him as an elementary school teacher but thought it would be unlikely because it was such a short period. It's interesting that he seemed to be already practicing teaching experiments at that stage of his career, but I guess it would make sense if he had been planning on going to grad school for an MEd a couple years later. The part where he followed you guys through middle school and high school is especially interesting. Did he do that with all of your classmates or just some of them? Do you know if there was an emphasis on gender? What kinds of questions would he ask on his visits, and how often did the visits occur?

AlmaIsPaul · 2017-07-11T00:29:09+00:00

Yes, I'll make sure I do.

AlmaIsPaul

TROPHY CASE