This excellent collection of essays not only honors one of the most influential LDS thinkers of the past forty years, David L. Paulsen, but does so as a beautiful example of the very sort of critically reflective and respectful interfaith dialogue that he worked so hard to encourage throughout his career as both a teacher and a writer.
We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…
In a polemical treatise from late antiquity, Tertullian famously asked, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” The readers of this essay might ask a similar rhetorical question of “What does Kashi have to do with Salt Lake?” What could we actually learn from the comparative study of Asian religions with Mormonism? Armed with tools and theories that largely extol the particular over the general, most contemporary scholars have been shaped to be suspicious of comparisons that excise the historical and universalize the local. Comparative projects seem so very retrograde. We snicker when we hear individuals cite comparative works like The Golden Bough or theories like phenomenology as authoritative sources or methods. Those projects were so pre-postmodern, we think as we roll our eyes. Nevertheless, I argue that if academic comparisons of Mormonism and Asian religions are disciplined, modest, and pragmatic, Kashi and Salt Lake have much to do with one another.
This paper is entitled “Religious Studies as Comparative Religion,” and its purpose is to suggest that comparative religion, as one way of engaging in religious studies, can be fruitful for historians of Mormonism.
To exist without beginning’s
ultimate mystery;
to comprehend end’s easy
as eternity’s imagined;
To hold the disciples’ throats
against His praise,
after the tied colt
is ushered in,
Children’s fingers folded in,
thumbs aligned,
hands heart-shaped,
knuckled boxes.
His death being end-stopped
never justifies
the enjambment
of my survival
that goes on and on,
I want to eat God, limb and line.
Each yellowing ivory Bible verse
Every sacrament of soft white
Bread and cool waters,
All of Him in a single bite.
Like Eve, I won’t even leave the core.
Across the field, a partial hedgeline planted
three hundred years ago still winds its way
between an ancient English oak and plum.
At sunset, their silhouettes turn granite-gray,