Interpreter — merely a “blog”?

I get a kick out of the determined efforts of some critics to minimize and dismiss Interpreter as just a “blog.”

Apologetics, they insist, is dead in Mormondom.  And, they triumphantly add (since at least some of this is about frank personal hostility), Daniel Peterson is a mere “shell” of his former self.

Well, there’s no doubt that Mormon apologetics took a significant hit in 2012, with the coup at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU.

But FairMormon continues to do well.  (Please mark your calendar, incidentally, for the 2018 FairMormon conference, to be held in Provo, Utah, on 1-3 August 2018.)  And Book of Mormon Central and the Interpreter Foundation, both founded in the wake of that abrupt 2012 Maxwell Institute “change in direction,” have been extraordinarily productive.  Together, these organizations have formed Mormon Voices, marking a new phase in defending and commending the claims of the Restoration.

I’ll return now to the Interpreter Foundation, in particular:

I think it quite amusing, in a world where more and more academic and non-academic publishing is moving toward online and other electronic formats, that the critics who affect to brush Interpreter off as merely a “blog” find themselves tacitly advocating an outmoded and increasingly obsolete understanding of publishing that recognizes only print media as genuine and authentic.  For these hidebound reactionaries, if scholarship is to count, forests must die and ink must be spilled.  Ideas and arguments and content are, in their implicit view, of little or no relevance.

Even so, the Interpreter Foundation has, in fact, published eight books.  And, moreover, every one of the twenty-eight journal volumes that it has published thus far is available in a variety of formats, including print.

Curiously, too, for a mere “blog,” Interpreter has also posted online “scripture roundtables” for the entire Gospel Doctrine curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, undertaken to create background “KnoWhys” for every Gospel Doctrine lesson, produced a half-hour film that has been featured on BYU Television, and, yes, hosted a blog.  It has, furthermore, produced a number of videos.  And, very unusual for a mere “blog,” the Interpreter Foundation has convened a number of conferences and, since the beginning of 2018, hosted a weekly two-hour radio program.

Methinks the critics do protest too much.

Happily, too, the Interpreter Foundation’s efforts continue and, if they receive sufficient support, will continue to grow.

You may, for example, enjoy this new Interpreter blog entry:

“Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s Witness of the 1978 Revelation on the Priesthood”

And here’s the latest article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, which has just been posted:

“The Word Baptize in the Book of Mormon”