The third and last installment of Duane Boyce’s essay has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:
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Notwithstanding my earlier reservations, I decided to stay for the last presenter of 2017’s annual FairMormon conference. But I talked all the way through his remarks, and I have absolutely nothing to say about them.
Those who want to see whether he lived up to his reputation for barracuda-like viciousness and toxicity will be able to judge for themselves when the video and transcript of his talk go up on the FairMormon website, which should happen reasonably soon. (He can run, but he can’t hide.) And, at the request of a Deseret News reporter who was there, that last speaker handed over a hard copy of his talk. So it’s possible (though by no means certain) that the Deseret News will eventually carry some coverage — presumably in its “police beat” section — of whatever malevolent horrors he had to say.
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And, by the way, speaking of the Deseret News, that newspaper has already carried an article about this year’s FairMormon conference:
“‘History skills’ can strengthen study of Book of Mormon witnesses, speaker says”
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Throughout its existence until 2012, those who led and contributed to what began as the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and eventually became the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship operated with something of an unofficial motto, drawn from an essay by the Anglican theologian and philosopher Austin Farrer, a close friend of C. S. Lewis — it was Farrer who took the last sacraments to Lewis just before the latter’s death — as well as of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers. It was a great favorite of Elder Neal A. Maxwell — see, for example, “Elder Neal A. Maxwell on Consecration, Scholarship, and the Defense of the Kingdom” — and it’s a great favorite of mine, as well:
“Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.” (Austin Farrer, “Grete Clerk,” in Light On C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb [New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1965], 26.
I don’t know that the current Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship views itself in these terms any more. But I’m confident that FairMormon, and the Interpreter Foundation and Book of Mormon Central and Brian and Laura Hales — see LDS Perspectives and Joseph Smith’s Polygamy — do regard their missions in very much that light. In my judgment, they’re trying to move the original FARMS vision forward.
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