A brief report from the first day of SMPT’s 2015 conference

Owing to my teaching schedule, I was able to attend only two sessions of today’s meetings of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology.  (I’ll do better tomorrow and Saturday.)

Fortunately, they were both very good.  Precisely the kind of presentations that I hope for from SMPT.

The first, a plenary session in the early afternoon, was Noel Reynolds’s “All the Learning of My Father: A Rhetorical Analysis of Nephi’s Writings and Its Theological Implications.”  That was the very first session of the conference, and, as the outgoing (and exceptionally useless) president of SMPT, I was able to welcome conference participants and to introduce Dr. Reynolds.  This was an honor for me.  He’s a long-time friend and a former colleague (a very enterprising and innovative one) in the leadership of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), now the Maxwell Institute.  He’s been a stake president, a mission president, a temple president, a senior administrator at BYU, and a very productive scholar in political philosophy, jurisprudence, and studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Book of Mormon.  

The evening plenary was Professor David Paulsen’s “Are Christians Mormons?”  Professor Paulsen was been a vitally important teacher and writer on the philosophy of religion at BYU for forty years, and is a beloved and widely revered human being, and it was good to hear from him again after his retirement from the University four years ago.  (Among other things during that period, he and his wife have served a mission to Iceland.)

I look forward to the publication of their papers.

My wife and I went out for Thai food between my last class and Professor Paulsen’s lecture.  And then, when we came home afterward, we found that a Mexican friend had brought by some of her peerless homemade chiles rellenos and her unequalled homemade flan.  They were waiting in the fridge.  So dinner is taken care of for tomorrow, too.

Life is very good.