John-Charles Duffy

JOHN-CHARLES DUFFY is a graduate student in religious studies at the Uni197 versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught for several years as an adjunct instructor at the University of Utah, where from 2001 to 2004 he organized a monthly Mormon studies brown bag series. His articles have appeared in Sunstone, Dialogue, American Transcendental Quarterly, and in Victorian Literature and Culture.

Correlated Praise: The Development of the Spanish Hymnal

Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 2

Statisticians predict that by 2012 native Spanish speakers will surpass native English speakers as the LDS church’s largest language group.[1] Clearly, the church is about to reach a dramatic turning point in its international growth.…

Clyde Forsberg’s Equal Rites and the Exoticizing of Mormonism

Articles/Essays – Volume 39, No. 1

Supposedly, now is an auspicious time to be doing scholarship on Mor monism. According to a 2002 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Mormon studies has received a “surge of scholarly interest” from specialists in various…

Can Deconstruction Save the Day? “Faithful Scholarship” and the Uses of Postmodernism

Articles/Essays – Volume 41, No. 1

Writing in the mid-1990s, Mormon-watcher Massimo Introvigne made a counterintuitive observation about debates over Book of Mormon historicity among Mormon intellectuals, as compared to analogous debates between Protestant fundamentalists and liberals. Fundamentalists, despite their reputation for being anti-scientific, were “deeply committed to Enlightenment concepts of ‘objective knowledge,’ and ‘truth,’” confident that an impartial view of the data would confirm the historical authenticity of the Bible. Protestant liberals, in contrast, deployed a “post-modern, anti-Enlightenment epistemology” to undermine absolutist readings of the Bible. The opposite dynamic, however, prevailed in the Book of Mormon debates. Liberals publishing with Signature Books—such as Edward Ashment and David P. Wright—were “staunch defenders of the Enlightenment,” with its ideals of disinterested reason and the unfettered search for truth, while conservatives publishing with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) held “the late modernist and post-mod ernist position that knowledge is by no means objective, and that ‘true,’ universally valid, historical conclusions could never be reached.”