[continued from here] As Matthew Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center, pointed out, the great Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is an in important source for a complex view of secularism that might assuage the fears of simpler folk like me. Now, it turns out that, in one of my rare breaks from going through Mormon Doctrine alphabetically and pondering the authoritative quotations mustered in The 5000-Year Leap, I actually read some books by Charles Taylor.  What’s more, I actually... Read more

As I was saying:  The Salt Lake Tribune has presented me as a critic of “secularism.”  Fair enough – I am happy to criticize something we can call secularism.  Adam Miller finds my program, as stated in Tribune, too simple.  Hancock poses a false choice, Miller says, between a faithful and a “secular” view.  Sure, he concedes, the academy’s view is secular, but that’s OK, because we can learn from secularism.  Anyway, the issues are not simple (as the Tribune’s... Read more

  I’m probably going to need to shorten that title in future installments… As I mentioned before, every month or so I try to break with my lifelong habit as an old white male might-as-well-have-grown-up-in-Orem Mormon of reading only the assigned, duly correlated Manuals — and, of course, Mormon Doctrine and The 5000-Year Leap — in order to experience the transgressive rush of dipping my toe in the pool of “secular” scholarship.  Kindle affords me the ability easily to cut... Read more

Before proceeding to a deft and devastating disarming of my critics, let me repeat my thanks to Peggy Fletcher Stack for her respectful attention to the Meridian/Expand project and more generally to my concerns about LDS scholars and intellectuals, at BYU and elsewhere.  When I noted that she was presenting my concerns from a standpoint different from my own, I was not accusing her of some specific bias, but only noting that she is unlikely to present my ideas in... Read more

I appreciate Peggy Fletcher Stack’s and the Salt Lake Tribune’s interest in our new initiative at Meridian Magazine, a page labeled “Expand” (as in Alma 32: “your mind doth begin to expand…”) and in the thinking that led me to take this initiative.  We certainly welcome the publicity for this important and still fledgling venture.  Peggy does us at Expand and her readers the service of quoting and paraphrasing parts of my argument for undertaking this new online publication.  Moreover,... Read more

Here’s my latest little piece on the significance of Rome for Western transcendence. Read more

My colleague and now Department Chair, Sven Wilson, recently (10/23) delivered the annual Virginia F. Cutler Lecture at BYU, hosted by BYU’s School of Family Life.  The auditorium was full (200+), and those who attended were well rewarded by a thoughtful, well-researched and in many ways brave lecture on “Love, Marriage and the Public Health.” After setting forth (for us non-economists) some basic principles concerning human capital and economic growth, Wilson proposed looking at the household as the key producer... Read more