The Coup: A Six-Month Retrospective

I’m writing this on the sixth month anniversary of the Coup–no other word will do–that expelled Dan Peterson as editor of the Mormon Studies Review and set the Maxwell Institute, for better or worse, on its current path.

In those six months the Interpreter Foundation has been organized.  We have created a vibrant and active web page, have presented, without failure, an article a week on our web site, and produced two printed volumes of our journal, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture–the second volume of which is available today.  The article queue for our third volume is almost complete.  We held a conference on “The Temple on Mount Zion” in September, and have two books under production.  We accomplished this with no budget and no paid staff, relying solely on the volunteer efforts of dozens of enthusiastic and generous supporters.

When Dan was dismissed six months ago, Gerald Bradford, the current director of the Maxwell Institute, promised “a new beginning for the Mormon Studies Review”–an interesting way to entitle an obituary.  During the subsequent six months, Bradford has produced … a meeting.  There is no new Mormon Studies Review.  There is no editor.  There is no journal.  No articles have been submitted and accepted.  Nothing is being edited.  No issue is in production.  Nothing has been published, and there is no timetable for future publication. The Maxwell Institute, by the way, has a dozen full-time people on its staff, an annual budget in the hundreds of thousands, and an endowment in the millions.  The difference is stark and striking.  And, quite frankly, there is no excuse for Bradford’s failure to revive the Mormon Studies Review, in whatever form he envisions.

I should further note that after the publication of John Sorenson’s forthcoming Mormon’s Codex (which has been in the works for several years, and is due in March 2013), the Maxwell Institute has no LDS-related books in its publication queue, in any stage of production.  Not a single new Mormon oriented book has been accepted for publication since Gerald Bradford became director of the Maxwell Institute.  He apparently directs an LDS research institute, with an endowment of millions of dollars given by donors specifically to support LDS-related research, which is producing no books whatsoever on Mormon topics.