Volume 44, No. 3

Among Latter-day Saint academics, few have achieved the professional stature or exerted the intellectual influence of Richard Lyman Bushman. Gordon Wood, a member of the blue-ribbon panel featured here and a scholar with few peers in the historical discipline, calls Bushman “one of our most distinguished American historians.” Generous and dignified as well, Richard Bushman is the proverbial “gentleman and a scholar.” His words and deeds have touched many lives across the span of his more than fifty-year academic career. To commemorate that career on the eve of his eightieth birthday, it seemed fitting to honor him among his professional colleagues and friends at the January 2011 annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). 

The thesis of this paper is a modest one, namely, that reading the Book of Mormon with an eye to its literary context significantly enhances the reading experience regardless of whether one’s objective is instruction, insight, aesthetics, or merely the pleasure of discovering coherence in its various details.A necessary corollary is that the Book of Mormon, as a text, is sufficiently crafted to warrant such attentive effort. There is nothing remarkable about the suggestion that internal context matters—that even a minimal level of understanding of any scriptural passage requires consideration not only of who is speaking, why, and to whom, but also of how a particular verse fits into a larger argument or interacts with nearby passages, or of how a discourse re lates to either its immediate or extended corresponding narrative. But this is not the manner in which Latter-day Saints typically read the Book of Mormon, either individually or as a community; even as we make our way sequentially through the book, we are much more likely to reflect upon isolated doctrinal proof texts or paraphrased narrative episodes. 

I’m going to try and convey aspects of Charles Taylor’s work that I find tremendously helpful in working through the challenges that all of us confront and that give rise to conferences like this one. Let me begin, however, with a personal note about Taylor. He is perhaps the most successful contemporary philosopher bridging the analytic continental divide and is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of social science, and the history of philosophy.

Jonathan Z. Smith famously remarked that “a comparison is a disciplined exaggeration in the service of knowledge.”One of the insights that has animated the study of comparative religion in the past several decades is that those doing the comparing must be aware of the kinds of knowledge they are serving. Said another way, scholars involved in the comparison of religions must confront questions such as: Why compare this one tradition with another? Does the comparison of two entire traditions, as opposed to comparing two persons, give the scholar too much leeway in constructing his or her own narrative? Does the comparison of two traditions or individuals lead to false dichotomies that serve an unspoken agenda? In short, what is the purpose of comparison?