As Presently Constituted: Mormon Studies in the Field of Religion | What Does Kashi Have to Do With Salt Lake?: Academic Comparisons, Asian Religions, and Mormonism
March 14, 2018In 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.
