“Ancient Metal Plates?”

Along with her sister, my wife and I drove the famous “Road to Hana” along the northeastern coast of Maui on Friday, taking time to walk out to waterfalls and sample local cuisine and gaze at spectacular vistas.  The road is very winding and slow, the landscape and its flora are wild, and I was many rugged and mountainous miles away from my computer.  So I’m very late in calling attention to the new review article that appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship early on Friday afternoon.  Here it is:  “The Flimsiest Show on Earth,” written by Blake T. Ostler:

Review of Lars Nielsen, How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass: The Second Greatest Show on Earth (Minnetonka, MN: self-pub., 2024). 390 pages. $19.95.

Abstract: Every so often an anti-Mormon book comes along that lowers the bar for attacks on the faith. How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass is one such work. It relies on speculation, conjecture, and tenuous connections to render, out of whole cloth, a hypothesis for the Book of Mormon’s creation that is almost laughable.

In connection with the current focus of the Come, Follow Me curriculum, you might also find this short Interpreter Foundation video of interest:  “Episode 28: Ancient Metal Plates?”

Witnesses of the Book of Mormon—Insights Episode 28: In Joseph Smith’s day, people claimed that his story of ancient metal plates was evidence against him—because no such thing existed. In modern times, with the discovery of many examples of ancient plates, critics now claim that, of course, Joseph knew about ancient records on metal. What do we really know about Joseph and metal plates? This is Episode 28 of a series compiled from the many interviews conducted during the course of the Witnesses film project. . . .  These additional resources are hosted by Camrey Bagley Fox, who played Emma Smith in Witnesses, as she introduces and visits with a variety of experts. These individuals answer questions or address accusations against the witnesses, also helping viewers understand the context of the times in which the witnesses lived. This week we feature Daniel C. Peterson, President of the Interpreter Foundation and Executive Producer of Witnesses; Richard Lyman Bushman, Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia University; Susan Easton Black, Emeritus Professor of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University; Gerrit Dirkmaat, Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University; and Paul Wuthrich, who played Joseph Smith in Witnesses. For more information, go to https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/. Learn about the documentary movie Undaunted—Witnesses of the Book of Mormon at https://witnessesundaunted.com/.

And, by the way, if you’re interested in watching Undaunted — which, of course, by all reasonable standards you should be — you can stream that docudrama at no charge via a link given at The Witnesses Initiative.  Moreover, for the rest of this month, you can likewise stream the theatrical film Witnesses itself for free, also by means of a link that is provided at The Witnesses Initiative.

Somehow, I had never so much as heard of the 2022 film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, starring Daniel Craig as the master detective Benoit Blanc, let alone seen it.  But we ended up watching it on Friday evening.  Some of you will no doubt have seen it — it seems to have done quite well at the box office — but I don’t want to spoil the plot for those who haven’t.  I can, however, mention one aspect of it that caught my attention:

In the narrative of the film, Miles Bron, the co-founder of a technology company called Alpha, hosts a murder mystery game at the Glass Onion, his mansion on a private island in Greece. He invites to it a group of his friends, to whom he repeatedly refers as the “Disruptors.”  This term made me think of my late friend Clayton Christensen, whom I first met when we lived on the same dormitory floor at BYU during our freshman year, prior to our missions.

In his famous 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton expanded on the concept of “disruptive technologies,” a term that he had coined in his co-authored article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” which was published in the Harvard Business Review for January–February 1995.

I wondered whether the scriptwriters for Glass Onion might perhaps have been thinking of the notion of “creative disruption” or “disruptive innovation” that is prominently  associated with Clayton and a few other management theorists and economic thinkers.  And then I saw a very brief scene in the movie that plainly showed the cover of a book, although the book was partially obscured by another object.  And the book was, of course, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, written by Clayton M. Christensen.

Incidentally, the concept of “disruption” is also prominently mentioned at the end of Glass Onion.  Unfortunately, Clayton passed away — much too young — at the end of January 2020, too early to have seen the movie.  But I like to think that he would have found its allusions to him and to his work amusing.  He is in interesting company in the film, which also features cameo appearances (as themselves) by such celebrities as Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Yo-Yo Ma, Jake Tapper, and Serena Williams.  And — oh yes — Jeremy Renner’s face appears on a bottle of hot sauce.

Although his health was already badly failing by then — I was obliged to transcribe his words from a recording, but the recording itself was so problematic that I myself needed to create the audio file for him — Clayton furnished the Interpreter Foundation’s 2015 Christmas essay: ““He Did It”: A Christmas Message.”  And, while I’m at it, Clayton also sent the following to me for sharing through the Interpreter Foundation:  “A Clarification from Clayton Christensen”

He was also the very first person, as I recall, to contribute an entry to my Mormon Scholars Testify website (now Latter-day Saint Scholars Testify):  “Why I Belong, and Why I Believe”

Yet another horror drawn from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything: File™:  “How BYU’s Master of Laws Program Is Blessing Individuals, Communities, the Church and Nations: Like the upcoming medical school, BYU’s LL.M. program is designed for non-U.S. students, creating leaders in nations around the globe”

Posted from Kāʻanapali, Maui, Hawaiʻi