Two non-Mormon academics who call Joseph Smith a “prophet”

My wife and I brought the Catholic philosopher Stephen Webb to our ward today.  He was able to attend sacrament meeting and almost all of Sunday school with us, before he and I had to leave for the airport.

He was, he said, very positively impressed.

I was certainly happy to have him there, and we had an excellent conversation on the way up to the airport, ranging from temples (he recently attended the open house of the newly completed Indianapolis Indiana Temple), through the organization of Mormon wards, LDS hymnody, Catholic and Mormon responses to divorce, and Plotinian Neoplatonism and its afterlife among medieval Isma’ili Shi‘ites.

Last night, during the question-and-answer session with him and Margaret Barker, he told our gathering that he considers Joseph Smith “a prophet.”  It would be interesting to “unpack” that statement, to know exactly what he means by it, but, certainly, his attitude toward Joseph is very positive.

I’m reminded of the famous Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom, who is Jewish:

“Whatever his lapses, Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history.”

“I also do not find it possible to doubt that Joseph Smith was an authentic prophet. Where in all of American history can we find his match? . . .   In proportion to his importance and his complexity, [Joseph Smith] remains the least-studied personage, of an undiminished vitality, in our entire national saga.”

– Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 82, 95