{"id":92788,"date":"2021-09-23T19:13:22","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T01:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=92788"},"modified":"2021-09-24T10:46:22","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T16:46:22","slug":"brief-ruminations-on-a-byu-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2021\/09\/brief-ruminations-on-a-byu-education.html","title":{"rendered":"Brief Ruminations on a BYU Education"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Kirtland<\/a>
The Kirtland Temple, in a fairly standard, almost iconic, view \u2014 this one from the visitor center of the Community of Christ.\u00a0 (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

First of all, I published this article in Meridian Magazine<\/em> earlier today:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the Lord Remembers Your Name: The Oliver Granger Prophecy\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Out of curiosity, I went to one of the local Deseret Book outlets a couple of days ago (near University Mall, in the southern part of Orem).\u00a0 I was pleased to see that DVDs of the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s dramatic film, Witnesses<\/em>, are available for sale at that store \u2014 and I presume that they\u2019re available in all<\/em> Deseret Book outlets.\u00a0 Wherefore, go forth and purchase.\u00a0 Our goal has always been to have this film reach the widest possible audience.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And please keep your eyes and ears open for the eventual completion and release of our accompanying docudrama, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me about the experience he was having as a postgraduate student at Queens College, Oxford.\u00a0 He had graduated with honors from Brigham Young University in economics \u2014 as evidenced by the fact that he was at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship \u2014 and he was now studying applied econometrics.\u00a0 (He later became a very famous Ivy League academic and author.\u00a0 Once, when I was in Jakarta, Indonesia, I saw multiple billboards announcing that my friend would be giving a lecture there the following week.\u00a0 In stark contrast, so far as I was aware there were no comparable billboards advertising my<\/em> visit to the city.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anyway, my friend knew the nuts and bolts of contemporary mixed economies really well.\u00a0 He could explain how they worked.\u00a0 But he discovered fairly quickly that he wasn\u2019t well-prepared to argue that such economies \u2014 capitalism, free markets, free enterprise \u2014 were good<\/em>, that they were preferable to the standard alternatives.\u00a0 At Oxford, he told me, he found himself surrounded by genuine, self-identified, and very bright Marxists and socialists, and that he felt himself ill-equipped to defend the morality of free economic markets against their very fundamental attacks.\u00a0 A highly intelligent fellow, he adjusted and eventually developed better arguments to support his views.\u00a0 But he felt that his BYU undergraduate education in economics, while in most respects a very good one that followed the standard American economics curriculum, had left him woefully underprepared on some of the most basic questions.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve thought for many years about what he said to me, and I think that the problem extends far beyond the Department of Economics.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let me now, though, approach the matter from another angle.\u00a0 I was listening last night to remarks from a prominent Evangelical philosopher who did his undergraduate work decades ago at Wheaton College<\/a>, in Illinois.\u00a0 He recalled how energized he was by the goal, at Wheaton, of taking an explicitly Christian approach to philosophy, literature, political science, and the physical and natural sciences.\u00a0 (Please note that Christian<\/em> here doesn\u2019t necessarily mean fundamentalist<\/em>.)\u00a0 I would have been, as well.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s a great project, to the extent that it\u2019s possible.\u00a0 And it reminded me of Brigham Young\u2019s advice to Karl G. Maeser about the academy \u2014 the forerunner of BYU \u2014 that he was to lead in Provo: \u201cYou must not attempt to teach even the alphabet or the multiplication table without the Spirit of God. That is all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not quite<\/em> the same thing as Wheaton\u2019s purported goal, but it\u2019s plainly related and might well lead toward it.\u00a0 How well is BYU doing? That\u2019s an important question to ask.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Arthur Henry King<\/a>, a Cambridge-educated British scholar who came late to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint and who taught for roughly a decade in the Department of English at BYU (and who was a major influence on both me and my wife [he commended me on my good fortune when we married]), thought that BYU\u2019s English curriculum wasn\u2019t sufficiently Latter-day Saint or Christian.\u00a0 Not that he wanted it to be totally<\/em> different from curricula elsewhere, but he wondered why it was virtually identical<\/em>.\u00a0 For example, as I recall, he wondered why English majors at BYU weren\u2019t exposed in their classes to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), the Anglican bishop who served as an overseer of the committee that produced the King James Version of the Bible.\u00a0 His writings are deeply Christian, and they\u2019re certainly of appropriate literary quality. After all, King pointed out, Andrewes was a major influence on T. S. Eliot, who ranked his sermons with \u201cthe finest English prose of their time, of any time.\u201d\u00a0 (And I myself would add that Kurt Vonnegut \u2014 who was, to put it mildly, a very different character than Eliot! \u2014 considered Andrewes \u201cthe greatest writer in the English language.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good question.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, another angle:\u00a0 A few years ago, I heard that Biola University, an Evangelical school in southern California that I used to pass fairly frequently, had a mandatory sophomore \u201cworldview\u201d course in which students were exposed to various -isms (e.g., Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, and so forth) and then encouraged to examine them in the light of a Christian worldview for their strengths and their weaknesses, their contributions and insights and the potential risks they might pose.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t know whether that Biola course still exists and I don\u2019t don\u2019t whether its task was well or poorly executed.\u00a0 I\u2019ve come across some good things out of Biola, but I also know that they\u2019ve sometimes hosted lectures and symposia that targeted the Restored Church in sensationalist, unjust, and not entirely honest ways.\u00a0 Still, I think that the idea of such a course is a very good one.\u00a0 I envy it.\u00a0 I wish that BYU had such a course.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bottom line:\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that BYU prepares its students as well as it ideally should to deal with the hostile ideas and ideologies that will confront them when they leave Provo for graduate school or wherever else.\u00a0 I wish that it did better not only in arming them against criticisms specific to the Restoration but in preparing them to resist \u201cthe philosophies of men\u201d by helping them to recognize the weaknesses and limitations of naturalism and other rival worldviews.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m old, and even more irrelevant now than I was previously.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finally, if you can stand it, a selection from the ever appalling Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u00a9:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLatter-day Saints Around the World: Country Newsroom Websites, September 23, 2021: Featuring service provided in the United States, Canada, Australia and Mexico\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 First of all, I published this article in Meridian Magazine earlier today: \u00a0 \u201cWhen the Lord Remembers Your Name: The Oliver Granger Prophecy\u201d \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Out of curiosity, I went to one of the local Deseret Book outlets a couple of days ago (near University Mall, in the southern part 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