spring 2011

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BYU HUMANITIES COLLEGE ALUMNI MAGAZINE SPRING 2011

HUMANITIESat BYU

2 H U M A N I T I E S a t B Y U

Deanf�om �

the human conversation—demands that we forget: “I suspect,” concludes Borges, “that [Funes] was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details” —those same details that might help us succeed during finals week but that inevitably fade.

What serves us best from our Humanities educa-tion is not the details themselves but the skills required to manage these details and new ones we acquire—skills that require us to sort and rank and relate information, to assign to it syntax and salience and virtue. One of my mentors was fond of reminding his students that “infor-mation becomes knowledge only when you create your own system out of it.” Creating that personal system of knowledge requires forgetting some things in order to endow others with meaning. Neil Postman made a simi-lar point in The End of Education, where he reminded us that among possible metaphors for learning—the fun-nel, the sponge, the strainer, and the sieve—the ancient Mishnah preferred the sieve: “the sponge . . . absorbs all; the funnel receives at one end and spills out at the other; the strainer lets the wine drain through it and retrains the dregs; but the sieve . . . lets out the flour dust and retains the fine flour” (175). The sieve is a metaphor for strategic forgetfulness.

Forgetting is not just a learning strategy, however; it is an ethical choice. We can choose to forget the flaws we see in the character of others; we can choose to for-get the offenses we have suffered; we can allow the dust of our own ill-considered acts to slip through the sieve of memory (see Alma 36:19). Choosing to forget, we begin to understand that grace, the instrument and the effect of atonement, is in its essence godly forgetfulness.

My sister recently gave my elderly father an anthol-ogy of poetry to help him remember phrases and images he had learned from his youth but which now, like much of his past, are slipping from him. In the pages of the book my father scribbled some personal notations like “much loved,” “very familiar,” or “I remember this one.” At the end of one poem he wrote, “well forgotten.” I’m

How much of what any of us, as students, wrote on our final exams have we remembered a year later? Five years later? Research on the subject tells us that regardless of major or study habits, we don’t remember much of the detail on which our final grades were based. Given that, perhaps there is a case to be made for the art of forgetting.

Remembering has undisputed value. Indeed, we might say that a primary objective of a humanistic education is to become a reliable carrier of the collective remembrances we call culture. However, oft-maligned forgetfulness has its own role to play. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges taught us the virtue of forgetfulness through his memorable story, “Funes the Memorious,” about a young man, Ireneo Funes, who, after suffering a catastrophic fall that left him paralyzed, forgets how to forget. Funes “could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams,” Borges tells us. “Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day . . . but each reconstruction had required a whole day.”

“Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He decided to reduce each of his past days to some seventy thousand memories. . . . With no effort he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. . . .”

But this prodigious memory proved to be limiting:

“It was difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).”

Indeed, one of the points of the story is that think-ing, reasoning, making critical decisions—engaging in

Dean John R. Rosenberg

In Praise of Forgetfulness

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8 Africa’s Ambiguous AdventureStudents attend a colloquium celebrating guest speaker Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel L’Aventure ambiguë, which explores finding faith in an increasingly secularized world.

10 Poetics of the RestorationGeorge B. Hadley explains why the Restoration of the gospel compels us to study and explore other cultures.

features

Front cover: Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane at BYU (see story on pages 8–9); photo used by permission of LarkPrints Photography

Back cover: View from JFSB east deck

departments2 From the Dean

4 Of Note

5 Moving On

17 Books that Made a Difference

18 Why I Choose to Give

18 How I Have Been Blessed

19 Alumni News

We invite readers to update their e-mail addresses with us. Please send updates to Carol Kounanis at [email protected]

in this issue

not sure what he meant by that enigmatic phrase, maybe only that he recognized a long forgotten but once famil-iar poem. Or perhaps “well forgotten” was an aesthetic judgment—that this poem was one unworthy of re-

membrance. Whatever he intended, the unusual phrase “well forgotten” impressed me as a label for the idea that forgetting can be a strategy for learning even as it is an ethical choice. ✦

10

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The College says farewell to several faculty members this year. Their devoted service to thousands of students will not be forgotten. To wish them well, please email Karmen Smith ([email protected]) for contact information.

✦ David Paxman (English Department) grew up in Provo, then grew up some more on a mission to Argentina, then again in graduate school at the University of Chicago, 1971–1976, again in his first teaching job at BYU-Hawaii, 1976–1988—where he discovered that if he was

teaching and no one was learning, he wasn’t exactly succeeding—then once again as a member of the English Department at BYU, 1988–2010. At BYU he taught British literature, specializing in the Restoration and the eighteenth century (1660–1780). BYU’s teach-ing and scholarship expectations gave him needed balance: when his classes were going poorly, he could thrust himself into researching and writing an article, and when an article was going poorly, he could remind himself that, after all, his students mattered more than anything else. He chaired department committees, wrote several accreditation self-studies, took a short turn as graduate coordinator, and served as associate dean for a spell. His plans include research and writing, family time and family history, tennis, travel, humani-tarian work, another mission (he and his wife Kathryn served in Argentina, 2006–2007), and further steps in what he sees as an endless process of coming of age.

✦ Douglas Thayer (English Department) started teaching in 1957, and in his fifty-four years he has taught under thirteen of the seventeen chairs of English. (The first three chairs served for a total of sevnty-two years!) Doug got a BA at BYU, an MA

Moving onat Stanford, and an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Iowa. His specialty was teaching fic-tion writing, but his first love was freshman English, which he taught virtually every year. Doug’s published work includes three novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir, and short stories in various quarter-lies. He has a new young adult novel finished and is working on the last story in a new collection he hopes will be out soon. Most of his fiction concerns faith-ful Mormons trying to live their somewhat conflicted lives. Doug is considered one of the pioneers of mod-ern Mormon fiction, and his work has won various awards. Doug has served as director of composition, associate department chair, and associate dean. Doug is married to author-attorney-editor Donlu DeWitt. They have six children and a growing number of grandchildren. After retirement, Doug plans to spend time in the Utah west desert mountains and elsewhere, searching for gold nuggets with his metal detector; looking for bear, cougar, elk, wildcats, and wolves with his powerful new binoculars (bought with the univer-sity retirement gift); fly-fishing and ice-fishing a great deal; writing novels and stories from a Mormon octo-genarian’s point of view; reading; and watching only the best movies. By assignment he is presently writing a history of the English Department to be put on the department website.

✦ Bob Russell (Asian & Near Eastern Languages) received a BA in anthropol-ogy from the University of Utah and a PhD in linguistics from Harvard University, with concen-trations in Arabic and Japanese. Between degrees, he served as a pilot in the Air Force during the Vietnam era. He began his

professorial career at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he taught Japanese and linguistics. In 1982, he joined the faculty at BYU, where he has taught a vari-ety of courses in Japanese and linguistics. His research interests include Japanese second language acquisition

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and attrition and computer-assisted language learning materials design and development. He has been prin-cipal investigator of large external grants. His service to the profession includes two terms on the board of directors of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, plus service as language and linguistics editor of the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. His service at BYU includes two terms as department chair, which only reinforced his belief that he has been privileged to serve with, and learn from, some of the most extraordinarily gifted faculty—men and women of both faith and learning—that he has ever known. For that reason, the mere contemplation of retirement has turned out to be more difficult than expected, but Bob has come to believe that retierment, like gradua-tion, is a commencement, bringing opportunities for renewal and the exploration of new horizons while, at the same time, giving fresh meaning to the notions of lifelong learning and service. He expresses grati-tude to his wife, Candy, and their five children, to his colleagues and students at BYU, and to his Father in Heaven, for the blessing he has had of serving at BYU.

✦ Wilfried Decoo (French and Italian Department) came to BYU after a twenty-five-year career at the graduate school of the University of Antwerp and long involve-ment in international research networks. In 1999, at age fifty-three, he started at BYU, where his main assignment was to teach

undergraduate writing. Wilfried has enjoyed work-ing with LDS students with whom he could share his testimony of the gospel and help them discover how language can carry spirituality. His favorite was a course where, among other things, students studied subsequent editions of the French Book of Mormon and analyzed why changes were made and to what extent these changes could be justified on the basis of possible connotations in the English original. From that multilingual perspective, there is much

to discover in the scriptures! Meanwhile, Wilfried also continued his research and publishing in foreign language pedagogy, though he did not teach at BYU in this area of his specialization. He also kept working on historical and sociological aspects of the Church in Europe, a passion he intends to keep alive during retirement years.

✦ Russell M. Cluff (Spanish and Portuguese Department) received his BA and MA from BYU and his PhD from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He taught four years at the University of Minnesota-Morris and two years at the University of Notre Dame. He came to BYU

in 1983 and, in the middle of his career, took a two-year leave to teach and to chair the Department of Modern Languages at Stephen F. Austin University. His area of interest has always been Latin American literature, with a special interest in Mexican prose. His scholarship has centered mainly on the Mexican short story. However, he always enjoyed teaching all genres of Latin American literature to his many incredibly diverse and talented students, whom he recognized as the first reason for his having chosen this profession. He enjoyed being involved with the creation of Study Abroad programs in the Dominican Republic and in Mérida, Yucatán. He also enjoyed directing the Puebla, Mexico program. In recent years, he became active in the musicalization of Spanish and English poetry, resulting in a CD of fourteen songs based on the sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. He will miss his association with outstanding colleagues and students.


✦ Charles “Chuck” Bush, Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Technol-ogy and Research Support Center, passed away on April 13, 2011, from complications of strokes. Chuck’s humani-ties education and his fluency or familiarity with several languages made him highly valued in his nearly forty years at BYU, in aiding fac-ulty members with computer research and technical help.

In recent years, he also was the coordinator of the minor in Computing in the Humanities. A colleague said, “Chuck helped to make the HTRSC a strong place for faculty assistance; he is very much missed.”

✦ Brian S. Best, Professor Emeritus of English, died on April 21, 2011. After a BA and an MA at BYU, a PhD at Wisconsin, a Danforth Fellowship year in England, and post-graduate work at Harvard, he taught at BYU for over 36 years. A younger colleague describes Brother Best as “one of the kindest and most encouraging men-tors anyone could had have.”

✦ J. Keith Slade, As-sociate Professor Emeritus of French, died on May 17, 2011. After an LDS mission in France, enroll-ment at BYU “to see if I could find a wife” (which he did), studies and de-grees from Arizona, BYU, and Indiana, he taught at BYU from 1963 to 1994. He supervised nine study

abroad programs and made a 500-mile walking tour of France. Brother Slade is remembered by colleagues for his “knowing smile and twinkling eyes” and for being “realistically and hopefully optimistic.”

o� Note✦ In February, BYU’s Department of Linguistics and English Language hosted, for the first time, a local round of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO). This was part of a worldwide yearly competition that tests high school students from the United States and throughout the world on their ability to solve linguistic analysis problems. The three-hour test was administered locally to a group of 18 high school students from the Salt Lake, Lehi, and Provo areas. Though no stu-dents from the BYU region placed high enough among the over 1,200 US participants to advance to the national and international competitions, there was a good first showing from local students, and they were introduced to the field of linguistics and the types of language problems that compu-tational linguists work with on a daily basis.

EMERITI DEATHSFACULTY DEATH

✦ In March, the Department of English sponsored the English Symposium, a showcase for outstand-ing student work, both graduate and undergraduate. Some 90 students presented scholarly and creative projects, and over 650 people—students, professors, and members of the community—attended. Student leaders from the Graduate Student Association and the English Society organized the event under the direction of faculty advisor Dr. Paul Westover. English faculty member Dr. Nancy Christiansen delivered an inspiring keynote address entitled “On ‘Going Pro,’” aptly capturing the importance of humanities skills for successful careers and lives.

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and not a little surprising, to know that such solitary work is actually resonating beyond my own head.”

✦ BYU sophomore Tessa Lush will spend a full year in Germany, starting in July 2011, the recipient of a work-study fellowship from the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, a pro-gram funded by the US Department of State. Lush, a German major, will live with a German host family.

The program is unique in that she will do an internship with an international firm, will take classes at a German university, and will study the language intensively. “It’s a big thing, and it’s easy to be scared,” Lush said. “But I’m sure it will be awesome.”

✦ In March, Professor Nicholas Mason of the English Department deliv-ered the Department of Communication’s Ray and Ida Lee Beckham Lecture for 2011. This annual lectureship is the culminat-ing event in the university’s “Communications Week” and aims to showcase

new scholarship on the role of mass media in society. Professor Mason was the first faculty member from outside the Department of Communications to receive this honor. Professor Mason’s lecture, entitled “The Rise of Mass-Media Puffery and the ‘Death’ of Literature in Georgian Britain,” explored the mutually constitu-tive relationship between literature and advertising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He focused particularly on how the expansion of the British press gave rise to puffery, a new form of literary market-ing in which authors and publishers used theoretically objective genres like news stories and reviews to hype their own works.

✦ In April, Kimberly Johnson of the English Department learned of her award as a 2011 Fellow from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Hers is one of 180 Fellowships awarded to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists from a group of almost 3,000

applicants. Dr. Johnson specializes in Renaissance literature and creative writing. Her fellowship was awarded on the basis of her “prior achievement and exceptional promise,” according to the Guggenheim Foundation’s Board of Trustees, and the fellowship is intended to support Johnson’s continuing work—spe-cifically to provide support as she completes her third collection of poetry, which is currently in progress. “It’s especially nice to have the Guggenheim Foundation send so much encouragement and in such a public way, because as a poet and scholar, I tend to spend a great deal of my time locked in the hermetic and intense silence of my own mind,” says Johnson. “It’s gratifying,

8 H U M A N I T I E S a t B Y U8 H U M A N I T I E S a t B Y U

A colloquium commemorating the 50th Anniversary of one of Africa’s most celebrated

works of literature united students and scholars at BYU on March 17–18, 2011. The colloquium, organized by Professor Chantal Thompson of the Department of French and Italian, explored Africa’s Ambiguous Adventure through Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel L’Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure) with a series of lectures and cultural events.

Published in 1961, L’Aventure ambiguë depicts the impact of Western secular culture on a deeply devout youth from Islamic Senegal. Chosen to attend colonial schools to “learn from them the art of conquering with-out being in the right,” Samba Diallo, the protagonist, is lured by the “light” of reason and science and starts to forget the “shadows” of intangible realities such as faith. Imploring God to “revive him to the secret tenderness,” Samba finally “hears” his father’s counsel: “Your salva-tion, the presence of God living in you, depends upon yourself.” Exploring the themes of faith vs. materialistic

pursuits, of tradition vs. modernity, the novel won the first Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique noire.

In the years following the publication of his semi-autobiographical novel, Kane served as a minister in the Senegalese government and as a dignitary in inter-national affairs. Visiting BYU for the third time, the eighty-two-year-old Kane traveled from Dakar to take part in the celebration. In his opening lecture, titled “The Clash of Culture and Faith in Colonial Africa,” Kane explained that L’Aventure ambiguë ’s message of finding God amidst the clamor of the modern world is a theme just as pertinent today as it was fifty years ago. “This confrontation between faith and agnostic culture is far from being resolved. It is the paradigm of the ambiguous and perilous adventure of the modern man, whatever his country, religion, and culture might be.”

Prior to an evening of African music and dance per-formed by Voice of Africa, a talented Utah Valley group, several BYU students paid tribute to Cheikh Hamidou Kane, thanking him for the impact his book has had on

by Nathan Baier, of the Daily Universe (March 21, 2011), and Chantal Thompson, of the Department of French and Italian, former Coordinator of the BYU African Studies program (photos courtesy of LarkPrints Photography)

Africa'sAmbiguous

Adventure

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their lives—a “magnificent book that gives a new perspective on faith” and “shows in a very powerful way how we must all find balance in our lives,” in the words of one student.

In a presentation the following day, Dr. Mamadou Bâ, from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, emphasized how Kane’s story of a man trapped between the pulls of two starkly different worlds teaches the importance of balance. “In pre-senting opposing visions of the world, the novel does not propose the choice of one over the other,” Bâ said, “but rather that we situate our human condition in the very crossroad of their relation.”

Like Bâ, Dr. Lydie Moudileno, from the University of Pennsylvania, praised Kane’s work, calling it a complex yet universal text whose appeal derives from its consistent ability to inspire. Dr. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, from Columbia University, explored in the novel, and in revealed religion, the ambigu-ous relationship between the (spoken)

Word of God and the (written) words of man. Then Abdourahman Wabéri, a master of the word in the new generation of African writers, expanded on the chal-lenges of writing: classics such L’Aventure ambiguë are made when the author manages to connect with God as well as with others.

In his closing remarks, Cheikh Hamidou Kane spoke of his second novel, Les Gardiens du Temple (The Keepers of the Temple, published in 1998), where the ambiguities of his early writings find a few prag-matic resolutions. In the end, what really matters is that “on earth as in heaven, God and man complement one another” and that “individual destinies blend into collec-tive purposes.”

The colloquium on Africa’s Ambiguous Adventure was funded by the BYU College of Humanities, Undergraduate Education and Honors, the Kennedy Center for International Studies, the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding, the Center for the Study of Europe, and Campus France (the educational arm of the French Embassy). ✦

Your Caption Here.

Your Caption Here.


Starting first with the proposition that the humani-ties and the Restoration both share an interest in

the preservation of threatened knowledge and in the recovery of lost knowledge, I would like to suggest fur-ther how these two forms of restoration can enjoin the same labor. Brigham Young dispensed with the notion of a strict distinction between sacred and secular forms of knowledge when he insisted that all truth belongs to Mormonism, that “every accomplishment, every pol-ished grace, every useful attainment in mathematics, music, and in all sciences and art belong to the saints.”1 However, this would seem to contradict the notion articulated in the Doctrine and Covenants that the two chief obstacles to our understanding of revealed truth are “disobedience” and “the traditions of [the] fathers” (D&C 93:39). Or as Paul put it, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossions 2:8). If these “traditions” are nothing but fallen discourses, honest but erroneous attempts to express the truth as reflected in contexts that have not enjoyed the fullest light of revelation, perhaps culture deserves, at best, only our cautious and distant

respect. But Brigham Young’s audacious claim is a call for charity, “to lay hold of every good thing” (Moroni 7:19). Charity is a Christ-centered viewpoint that requires the faith and desire to glean truths from secular sources in all cultures. In this way, secular learning of culture becomes integral to the kingdom’s healthy and ongoing unfolding of the restoration of all things. As the first section of Doctrine and Covenants makes clear, God defines his commandments as divine mandates (they “are of me,” he declares) even though they are also transmitted in the language of local understanding: they “were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language” (D&C 1: 24). So while culture might be the obstacle or weakness that blinds us, it must also become the means or language by which we “might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24). The key to this process is an uncompromised dedication to understanding God’s will that links a lifelong passion for learning both from the word of God—from revelation—and the word of men and women—from the world’s cultures.

The humanities—literature, philosophy, history, and the arts—are born of a striving to bear witness to human

by George B. HandleyDepartment of Humanities, Classics,

and Comparative Literature

PoeticsRestoration

of the


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experience in all of its varieties, usually under conditions in which the particularities of experience are threatened by oblivion. Whether it is against the grain of a dictato-rial political regime or of the dehumanizing forces of a consumption-obsessed economy like ours, expression in the humanities offers itself as a kind of countermemory, one individual experience at a time, to the oblivious tendencies of power, to the passage of time, and to the per-sistent patterns of sin. Human expressions are rarely without sin or error, of course, but because they always demand attention to the particulars of individual lives and distinct cultures, they can provide a valuable check against our tendency to rush to quick and glib generalizations about what we deem to be the universals of human experience. If, as it has often been said, it is hard not to love someone whose story you know, it is also easy to hate or ignore someone whose story you can generalize.

The humanities also help us to see how our own particulars of cultural context have shaped our views, including our views of God. Revealed religion, of course, is by definition an expression of truth that transcends human particulars, but, if we are serious in our devotion to revealed truths, it is imperative that we are mindful of how our own culture informs and shapes our under-standings. Only by comparative and promiscuous read-ing about individual lives embedded in other cultures can we become more aware of our embeddedness in our own. Perhaps the “traditions of men” that are most dangerous are those ideologies and discourses that will-fully ignore the sanctity of God’s children and impetu-ously and impatiently bypass the responsibility of having to approach humanity one story at a time. When we speak of seeing someone’s true “humanity,” we mean that we can see their identity as it has been shaped by time and circumstance, that we have caught a glimpse of the complexity and mystery of their inner life, and that we feel an elemental compassion for their story. It is equally important, of course, to see our own humanity, lest we fail to understand how we might see the world differ-ently had we lived a different life. When the faithful disciple engages deeply with the particulars of a culture and emerges with a changed, reoriented, and enlarged vision of human experience, the humanities prove inte-

gral to the ongoing restoration of all things. In that the humanities ask us to engage in imagining the world, or in world-making as the word “poetics” implies, conse-crated learning becomes a poetics of the Restoration.

Even if the essential ordinances and doctrines of the gospel have already been restored, the extension and application of the saving power of its doctrines depend

in part on this expansion of our understand-ing of the broad varieties of the human condi-tion. Because

the passion, or suffering, of Christ is compassion—a suffering with all of humanity—cultivating the mind of Christ means developing an increasingly profound understanding of how the gospel relates to the diversity, range, and levels of human experience. It means learn-ing Christ’s atoning sorrow, which is an expression of understanding or feeling for the particularities of human circumstances. Thus, although “the traditions of men” are always a potential roadblock to understanding gospel truths, passion for the humanities founded on devotion to the Lord helps the believer to use the humanities’ portrayal of those very particularities to consecrated ends.

Both secular and spiritual knowledge require a patient forbearance, a willingness to allow truth to sur-face only after earnest experimentations upon the word, as Alma describes (see Alma chapter 32). This kind of patient and deepened vision will not come from a super-ficial assessment and least of all from a cold dismissal

If we are serious in our devotion to revealed truths, it is imperative that we are mindful of how our own culture

informs and shapes our understandings.

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of cultural difference. Preparatory for anyone to gain greater light and understanding is the cultivation of an awareness of others that keeps the soul open to mystery and wonder in the world around us and a humble accep-tance of the limits of our understanding. It is no secret to lifelong scholars that such awareness of limits only grows with time and effort. Seeking out the “best books” is a step in the direction to be able to say, like Nephi, “I know that [God] loveth his children, nevertheless I do not know the meaning of all things” (1 Nephi 11:17). Belief in Christ, in other words, requires vigilant aware-ness of what we do not know and cannot be separated from a vital interest in the world, in the affairs of men and women, and in the many cultural expressions that shed light on the human experience.

It is our human condition to inherit culture, so the traditions of men are going to shape and compromise the way we understand the gospel, one way or another. This is one reason why we are wise to overturn the soils of culture from time to time, lest the truths that we think we hold dear become reified, heretical, or false. Mormon explains that the intellectual purpose of charity is to “search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if ye will lay hold upon every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ” (Moroni 7:19). Further, in D&C 98:11, it states: “I give unto you a commandment, that ye shall forsake all evil and cleave unto all good, that ye shall live by every word which proceedeth forth out of the mouth of God.” Discipleship, in other words, is incomplete if we are merely content to forsake evil by holding on to what we already have.

While we mustn’t use faith as an excuse to avoid the risks of learning and growing, discipleship is also incomplete if, in our attempt to identify and cleave unto the good in the lives of men and women, we do not maintain, as a keel and rudder on an otherwise perpetually drifting ship, an orthodox devotion to what has already been revealed. This is perhaps the fate of no small number of aspiring scholars who, willing to take notes in lecture halls and to study long hours into the night, remain unwilling to give the scriptures or the teachings of the prophets more than a cursory glance. As James reminds us, culture blinds all of us when we

refuse to allow God’s word to penetrate our character or when we prefer the life of ideas or convictions to a life of committed moral action (see James 1:22–23). We must resist, in other words, the temptation of assuming that it matters more to be right than to do good.

Religion benefits from conscious awareness of the role our own culture has played, for better or for worse, in shaping our understandings of God’s purposes. Consider the ways in which their place in a particular culture and at a particular moment in history blinded Peter and his fellow disciples from understanding on the eve of the Pentecost just how much more gener-ously they needed to apply the gospel. Despite their ultimate inclusion of the Gentiles, Christ chastised the Old World disciples for their “stiffneckedness and unbelief ” because they failed to understand how much more diverse and geographically distant the other sheep might be (3 Nephi 15:18). To have congratulated them-selves merely for finally understanding that the Gentiles deserved the gospel fell short of understanding just how many “Gentiles” the world over in far away and even unknown lands qualified for the blessings of the gospel.

If it is “stiffneckedness” to have failed to imagine a people on a land mass previously unknown to the Old World, how much more unfaithful to the Lord is it for us to live in this age of unprecedented access to global information to willfully ignore the particular histories, experiences, languages, and cultures of all of God’s children. We rightly look forward to the prophesied day when Zion will be the envy of the world for its cultural

accomplishments and secular knowl-edge, but we have too often imagined that this would involve an immer-sion in our own Mormon uniqueness

and exceptionality and our claim to have the complete treasure-house of knowledge. If the traditions of men can be the stumbling block to our proper understand-ing of the gospel, we cannot hope to sort through the murky diversity of human experience in order to identify dangerous falsehoods if we are not equally committed to finding marvelous truths, that is, those portions of the word that he has told us has been revealed across the world, to men, women, and children, according to the “heed and diligence which they give unto him” (see Alma 12:9–11 and Alma 32:23). No perpetuation of


Zion’s greatness, I believe, will come because we will leave no stone unturned, because we have an insatiable curiosity about how others have generated ideas and lived values unique

to their circumstances.

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the Restoration is possible if we turn our back on the many rich and varied traditions of men and women, the cultural achievements of the so-called heathen. Zion’s greatness, I believe, will come because we will leave no stone unturned, because we have an insatiable curiosity about how others have generated ideas and lived values unique to their circumstances.

Of course, lest we lose our moorings in the process, individual devotion to the Lord’s oracles is the begin-ning and returning point for all learning. It is also useful to remember that no one person can obtain sufficient knowledge to fully grasp the extent of the Restoration of all things. In this quest, there is no room for aca-demic, political, or cultural chauvinism, or for anti-intellectualism or fears of honest and open discussion of opinions. We don’t want to be like those in Milton’s day who wished to burn or ban books because they preferred an orthodoxy based on hearsay or on authority alone and not on personal witness or investigation. Milton believed that secular learning could aid in “reforming the Reformation” because truth always needed further revi-sion. “Opinion in good men,” he wrote, “is but knowl-edge in the making.”2 For Milton, the earnest Christian’s duty was to “hear . . . all manner of reason” and to com-mit to “books read promiscuously.”3

In other words, Milton understood that truth had been scattered throughout the world and that its broken body must be searched for aggressively and reassembled in a gathering of insights from all books. Mormon suggests similarly that human judgment is flawed by two fundamental errors: judging that which is evil “to be of God and that which is good and of God to be of the devil” (Moroni 7:15). Mistaking truth for error is as morally dangerous as mistaking error for truth. The countless truths that have been buried by such mistaken judgments historically have been ruinous and argu-ably the very reason why art and why a dispensation of Restoration are necessary. As Milton notes, “Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.”4 The only way he could imagine that we could fight against these consequences was to adopt a spirit of anticipation: “The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.”5

Our willingness to withhold premature judgment about how ideas fit into the great expanse of God’s knowledge requires charity, Christ’s power to “bear all things,” which, among other benefits, strengthens us

with patience to withstand the apparent contradictions of ideas, thus keeping us open to greater understand-ing. This openness gains direction gradually because it is framed by belief in an eventual restoration of all things. Without faith in this ultimate moment of circum-scription of all truth to act as our compass, the partial knowledge we obtain against the great tide of chaos and forgetting that seems to be the sea we swim in would diminish, instead of instill, hope. Indeed, we might say that knowing an idea, feeling its truth, is a brief glimpse into a mind in which all things are known. It is as if we instinctively feel that our newfound comprehen-sion is evidence that ideas can never be lost, even if they are often lost to our memory or changed by new information. Trust in the Restoration means that we play at secular learning, experimenting on the word long enough to harvest what fruit an idea bears.

In his monumental essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot argues against culture’s tendency to fetishize originality and uniqueness, what “least resembles anyone else,” in a work of art.6 The newness that we think we admire in a great work of art is really a function of the individual talent’s ability to transmit tradition as if it were new. This poetics of rei-magining and rearranging the past allows the individual talent to render all ages contemporaneous. Eliot notes that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of [an individual’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”7 These voices of the dead are displaced and reorganized by the voice of the individual talent so that new understandings emerge that simultaneously feel like things we always or once knew. It is as if to say that creating a new work of art is really only a poetic read-ing, a restoration of what an earlier work of inspiration sought to express.

So one mistake we might make when we suggest that Mormons can achieve the level of accomplish-ment of the Bachs and Shakespeares of the world is to assume that there is a kind of radical originality in what must be accomplished. If we really believe in the Restoration, it is well to remember that as unique as we sometimes insist it is, Mormon belief is nothing new; it is the oldest understanding of the cosmos. So we could say that we already have our “Mormon” Bach: the J. S. Bach of the Brandenburg Concertos and the B-minor mass we have come to love. There are as many Mormon writers as there are Mormon readers. That is not to say that we shouldn’t aspire to Bach-like or Melville-like

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accomplishments, but who would want a culture without Bach or Melville? If we are serious about the endeavor of gathering the house of Israel and if all of world cul-ture is up for grabs, Mormon culture stands to become something much more broad and inclusive, much more diverse, and much more sympathetic to the world than any of us has imagined. Indeed, it would seem that it has to if the work of Restoration is to go forward.

Mormon individual talent will achieve greatness when it exhibits what Eliot calls a “continual extinction of personality” because “the poet has, not a ‘personal-ity’ to express, but a particular medium, . . . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”8 The goal of Mormon art or Mormon learning should not be “a turning loose,” to use a phrase from Eliot, of Mormonness so that the whole world looks at us in envy to say that we have something special, unique, or original.9 I suspect admiration will come when the culture of Mormonism is invested in the cultures of the world, when we are seen as a people actively engaged in empathetic, disciplined conversations with other traditions, beliefs, and cultures. Eliot is sug-gesting a paradox; the expression of Mormonism would be an escape from whatever we think “Mormonness” might mean. We need not fear. This is not a denial or denigration of who we think we are, for as Eliot notes, “Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”10 In other words, the individual talent is adopted into the family tree of cultural achievement without compro-mising originality. In the terms I have been discussing, this talent is a reading of the past that is simultaneously a transmission of the old and a creation, a poetics, of something new. This has important implications for a con-temporary LDS religious culture that is still very much invested in our uniqueness, still predomi-nantly shaped by American culture and history, and still emerging from its origins on the Wasatch Front.

Indeed, we seem as a culture to be at a crossroads. We are becoming increasingly international in member-ship, multilingual as a body and as individual members, and global in our reach. And yet we remain as closely identified as ever with a narrowly defined version of

American nationalism, with a specific political party, ethnicity, and geography. This is most evident, per-haps, in the way that US Americans who descend from British Island and Scandinavian stock tend to read their own story into the Book of Mormon to the exclusion of other Americas and other Americans. This is despite the fact that the book is not exclusively about Anglo-American experience within the geopolitical borders of the United States. Rather, it describes a geography in the Americas of shifting political boundaries with a plurality of cultures of various races. Surely one of its most powerful messages is its warning against geopoliti-cal chauvinism. Nephi asks us: “Know ye not that there are more nations than one?” (2 Nephi 29:7). It offers a vision of unity for that plurality, to be sure, but like the New World’s greatest novels, it also issues stern warn-ings about the dangers of entrenched claims to identity that use force or chauvinism to achieve unity. Most significantly, it points to additional books of equal value to come forth from other lands.

If America was the cradle of the Restoration, perhaps we would do well to consider rethinking what America means; it needn’t be an ethnically narrow and geographically restricted America but rather a cross-cultural and transnational location where a dizzying variety of diasporic communities gather, commune, and influence and change each other, and thereby challenge singular ethnic or political claims on the meaning of any one nation. In other words, if it has been suggested that the Restoration took place in the United States because of its particular opportunities of religious and political freedoms, perhaps it is time to consider that American experience has also laid the groundwork for a New

Jerusalem, a Zarahemla of sorts, that can become one of the great gathering places of the world’s cul-

tures: the Americas of Canada, the United States, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America; the Americas of Native Americans from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic; of Asian immigrants from Canada to Argentina; of the vast African diaspora; the Americas of Latin American, Arab, European, and other interna-tional and intranational migrations. These have all yet to play their transformative role in the Restoration.

Admiration will come when the culture of Mormonism is invested in the cultures of the world, when we are seen as a people actively engaged in empathetic, disciplined conversa-

tions with other traditions, beliefs, and cultures.


S p r i n g 2 0 1 1 1 5

In their habits of reading and learning, some Mormons feel hesitant to embrace the educational and scholarly objectives of our politically correct and multi-cultural times because of today’s increasing balkaniza-tion of identity and secularism. But there are dangers too of a narrow cultural or geographical claim on eternal truth because of the ways that it isolates and excludes. Surely it is not insignificant that the Book of Mormon tells the story of immigrants, portrays the brotherhood between races, and exposes in no uncertain terms the unfinished nature of God’s revelations to humankind. Indeed, the Book of Mormon exposes the story of lost histories that are the result of sin, arrogance, and violence. It calls for greater humility and repentance in light of the ruptures and gaps of history, and contin-ual need to circle back again to that which has been hid-den since the foundation of the world.

The Restoration in the last days implies that his-tory moves forward but also leaves behind in its wake a series of forgettings; his-tory, in other words, results in simultaneous rupture and continuity. The Book of Mormon, for example, portrays the arrival of the Gentiles in the New World, an event that results simul-taneously in the perpetuation of God’s covenants and a loss of truth. (The Gentiles were presumably not only our British but also our Hispanic forebears. I see no rea-son why the Book of Mormon’s account of the discovery of the Americas is not also telling the story of Hispanic Catholic colonies who, arguably more assiduously than the English Protestants, devoted extraordinary efforts to bringing the word of God to millions of the native inhabitants of the Americas.) We are told that the Gentiles receive “the power of the Lord” to defeat their mother colonies and to exercise power over the Native Americans to establish territory for themselves “out of captivity” (1 Ne. 13:16, 13). They carry with them the word of God, which contains “the covenants of the Lord” but is also missing “many parts which are plain and most precious” (1 Ne. 13:23, 26).

The results are mixed: the Gentiles are simultane-ously described as “lifted up by the power of God above all other nations” and yet the fragmented truths they possess “blind and harden the hearts of the children of men” and “an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them,” resulting in an “awful state of blindness” (1 Ne. 13:27, 29, 32). History, when not restricted by geopolitical interests, tells the stories of great and flawed founders. It is hard to see why we should give sole priority to the story of European settlement in the New World when in its wake, thousands of Indians were enslaved, only to be replaced by millions of Africans; and millions

of Indians died of disease, so many that by the mid-seventeenth century, the indigenous population of the Americas, estimated to be at 54 million prior to 1492, fell by almost ninety percent.

Literary and historical production in the Americas, especially over the last fifty years, has shown pro-found interest in the early years of colonialism, the breadth and depth of over three centuries of African slavery throughout the Americas, and indigenous life. Moreover, the stories of

immigrants and their family memories, the ethnic plurality of cities in the Americas, and the connections between the Americas and the rest of the world have figured more prominently in the liter-ary and scholarly imagination of hundreds of writers and thinkers throughout the Americas than in any previous era of history. They suggest that the profound differences among a plurality of Americans and Americas should challenge us to imagine our kinship, since in the end the great meaning of the gathering of the house of Israel is not always blood descent but adoption. This commit-ment to hearing scattered stories is a means of testing and potentially expanding the limits of community. It is how a poetics of restoration can avoid the pitfalls of an unhealthy obsession with a community’s unique and sometimes hardened claims to its claim to roots. We see these obsessions whenever there is undue pride about

S p r i n g 2 0 1 1 1 5


the exceptional nature of a particular culture’s origins or unhealthy protectionism about the purity and singu-larity of those origins. It is not insignificant that such negative protectionism has so often yielded to violence. It certainly enriches our understanding of the past to acknowledge heroism and inspired acts and newords, but it does not diminish America to acknowledge the violence, the pride, and the stumbling blocks that have also moved his-tory forward. Such acknowledgement does not preclude the possibility that any nation’s affairs have been providentially aided. Indeed, doing so helps us to see providence more clearly against the background of human choices. If we were to take the Book of Mormon as our inspiration, we might see a recovery of such plural and sometimes contradic-tory histories as our sacred duty.

Genealogy teaches both the diachronic heritage back through time and the synchronic interrelatedness of communities across time. Family trees are sometimes used to stress parental links at the expense of the vast and virtually unmappable network of kinship every human being possesses across time with an innumer-able family of lost cousins. The genealogical search is a discovery of heritage, but it can also be a discovery of the limits of our understanding of blood, the perpetual mystery of life stories that remain beyond our grasp, and the need to supplement the inevitable lack of sufficient documentation with imagination. If there was a time when those inspired by the spirit of Elijah were able to boast of their monarchic ancestors in the Old World as far back as 1066, perhaps it is time we start using genealogy to help us see our responsibilities toward our present-day kin among the far-flung races and religions of the world we inhabit. To express ourselves, to know ourselves, and to be truthful to our heritage all imply that we become answerable to and interested in other peoples, other cultures, other times and places.

Who and what we imagine our community to include is often more potent than what our bloodlines indicate about our identity, and this is why culture is so important to understanding ourselves and others. If our ultimate objective is the community of the Abrahamic

covenant, a binding of all the families of the earth, it is an understatement to say that there remains a lot of work to do to prepare our hearts to welcome all of God’s children. Every conversion to the gospel, every consecra-tion of one individual life, and every way of seeing the world within the framework of the great plan of happi-ness represents an adoption and an architectural retrofit-

ting of the house of Israel. The spirit of Elijah in its broad-est sense represents the search for lost knowledges in the world and the attempt to convert

transgression and errantry, individuality and particular-ity, bloodlines and geographies, into the new substance of the story of all humankind. We can never be sure we properly understand the relationships we imagine among cultures, but charity to bear all things, includ-ing, for the time being what appear to be unassimilable differences, may allow us the opportunity to restore the meaning and shape of the community we hope to establish. In this sense, we are invoked as poetic cre-ators in this ongoing restoration of all things. The aim is to remake our Mormonness, both individually and as a culture, so as to allow more and more of the world’s hidden truths to resonate in what we claim to believe, a prospect that I think bodes well for performing the great labor of the gathering of Israel and the restoration of all things. ✦

1. Brigham Young, quoted in Spencer W. Kimball, “The Gospel Vision of the Arts,” Ensign 3 ( July 1977), 3.

2. John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), 717.

3. Milton, “Areopagetica, 713.4. Milton, “Areopagetica, 712.5. Milton, “Areopagetica, 716.6. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in Selected Prose

of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), p. 37.

7. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 39.8. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 40, 42. 9. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 43.10. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 43.

Every conversion to the gospel, every consecration of one individual life, and every way of seeing the

world within the framework of the great plan of happiness represents an adoption and an

architectural retrofitting of the house of Israel.


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Books that made

a difference

I first read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road soon after it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I was profoundly moved by the novel and its thought-provoking explora-tion of the complex dynamics of parent-child relation-ships. The father in the novel protects the boy from the horror around them, and the boy also keeps faith when the father’s faith wavers. I have since read the novel many times and include it in the reading assignments in my own college literature courses.

simple farmer has lost his much-loved wife in death, and complains bitterly, only to be answered by Death. Al-ternately patient and understanding and then direct and demanding, the two struggle to make their points and counter those of their opponent, in thirty-three essays, with God having the last word. Classic literary coun-terpoint, beautifully done in poetic prose. The German in my 1957 Insel-Bucherei edition is modern, not the original, but the pages are rich in perspective and pas-sion, rhetoric, and reason, evocative in the use of vocabu-lary, cadence, and rhyme. The style of the writer, care-fully precise and pointed, allows the farmer and Death each to pile one point upon another in making their case, almost as in a court of law, the dialogue laced with heavy doses of scorn, vehemence, outrage, sarcasm, and irony, sometimes careless courage, and then a responsive rebuttal just as keenly presented. The plowman has no recourse, naturally, and in the end must resign himself to Death taking his sweetheart away. The emerging ferment in the theology of that time—Jan Hus and the emergence of the Reformation—cannot help but influ-ence the exchange, as the author crafts a masterwork that inspires with concepts that lift and lighten our path, reminding us to put spiritual things above earthly things. As an LDS reader, I see that the author drew upon a wise source for his ideas and expression.

1. (The Plowman from Bohemia) or Der Ackermann und der Tod.2. Also known as Johannes von Saaz.

Gary TottenMoorhead, MinnesotaEnglish MA, 1993

Louis DornySeattle, WashingtonGerman BA, 1966; MPA, 1980

The Road ✦ by Cormac McCarthy

Der Ackermann aus Böhmen1 ✦ by Johannes von Tepl2

Books and reading—–what an incomprehensible gift to each of us. Looking back on a half century and more, there are many that have stirred and stroked, but only about a half-dozen stand out. One of them, Johannes von Tepl’s Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, one of the first books printed in German (written about 1400, printed about sixty years later), is fascinating on several levels. A

Let us hear from you! Tell us about a book, or several, that made a difference for you, at some point in your life. Include your name, major, year of graduation, and current place of residence, with a description about the book’s influence on you. Email [email protected]


My internship in Moscow, Russia, was a pivotal moment in my educa-tion at BYU. I worked in the Slavic Center for Law and Justice, learning from individuals and clocking 40 hours a week translating memo-randa, press releases, and other legal documents. In addition to these responsibilities, I gained exposure to the Russian legal system by wit-nessing two oral arguments, one in the Supreme Court of the Russian

Federation and the other in the Moscow City Court. I am now a first-year student at Columbia Law School and I cannot overstate the importance of this internship in shaping my future career. Thank you so much. ✦

Why I Choose to giveThere is something magic about the power that

people have as a collective body. As teachers, as alumni, as students entering the workforce for the first time, we sometimes might feel powerless to affect changes in the world, thinking that one tiny gesture on the part of a single individual cannot do much. I have learned to think wide, to think macro-cosmically! When we all put together our little 369 pennies, we can move mountains, and we can raise the $100,000 committed by the Dean. 369 pennies multiplied by the power of the Humanities can be huge. ✦

Did everyone catch the inside front cover of the Winter 2011 issue of Humanties at BYU? My check for the College’s internship programs—possibly the smallest I ever wrote in my life—was in the mail immediately: 369 pennies for a good cause. I cannot even call it generosity on my part. It’s more like

giving up a couple of bagels, or half the price of a movie ticket, or a slice of pizza at the mall.

Dr. Ilona Klein Professor of Italian, BYU

How I have been blessed

Jon Olsen, BA in Russianand Economics, 2010

. . . 369 Pennies

S p r i n g 2 0 1 1 1 9

Alumni News

In the last issue of Humanities at BYU, Dean Rosenberg asked each person who receives this maga-

zine to contribute $3.69, that person’s share of a goal of raising $100,000 to increase internships and make them more affordable to students. Thanks to Dr. Klein (see page 18) and a handful of others, we have made a start towards our goal. To date we have over $4,400 (4 percent of our goal) but, as you can see, the number of respondents is so low it hardly registers on the above graph. We need many, many more of you to respond

in order for us to reach our goal. Oftentimes when we apply for grants from corporations and foundations, they want to know about alumni contributions—not the amount of money contributed by alumni, but the percentage of alumni participating. A high participa-tion rate indicates that our alumni valued their experi-ences here and want to ensure that others have the same opportunities. We hope you’ll consider joining Dr. Klein and your fellow alumni to help us bless our students now and in the future.

“A Math Assignment”—How It Totals Up So Far

Washington, DC, EventDr. John Rosenberg, Dean of the College of Humani-ties, hosted an event with Humanities alumni at the Milton A. Barlow Center (site of the BYU Washington Seminar) on February 23, 2011. It was wonderful to meet so many successful alumni and hear about their in-teresting career paths. We know there were many more alumni who were unable to attend the event due to loca-tion or schedule conflicts, but take heart—there will be more events to come! To be added to the list for future events, please contact Carol Kounanis at [email protected].

Education Week—Humanities Home EveningOn Monday, August 15, 2011, we will be holding the second annual “Humanities Home Evening” for Educa-tion Week attendees and all Humanities alumni and friends in the Provo area. Dr. Donald Parry, Professor of Hebrew, will talk about his research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The program will be from 7:00–8:00 p.m. in room B002 of the JFSB. For more information, please contact Carol Kounanis at [email protected].

Chicago EventHumanities alumni and friends in the Chicago area: mark your calendars on September 18, 2011, for a program by Dr. David Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy. Dr. Paulsen

holds a degree in Law from the University of Chicago and has written numerous articles on Joseph Smith, as well as articles on philosophy and religion. For more details, please contact Carol Kounanis at [email protected].

4%

Percent of goal reached

We’d like to hear your views, your m emories of campus experiences, or an update on your life since leaving BYU. Please email [email protected].

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Humanities at BYU is the alumni magazine of the College of Humanities.

college of humanitiesJohn R. Rosenberg, DeanRay Clifford, Associate DeanGregory Clark, Associate DeanScott Sprenger, Associate DeanRon Woods, Assistant DeanDave Waddell, Assistant DeanJared Christensen, College ControllerKarmen Smith, Executive Secretary

academic center directorsRay Clifford, Center for Language StudiesNeil Anderson, English Language CenterJill Rudy, American StudiesJesse Crisler, Center for Christian Values in LiteratureDana Bourgerie, Chinese Flagship ProgramKirk Belnap, National Middle East Language Resource Center

academic department chairsScott Miller, Asian and Near Eastern LanguagesEd Cutler, EnglishCorry Cropper, French and ItalianMichelle James, Germanic and Slavic LanguagesMichael Call, Humanities, Classics, and Comparative LiteratureWilliam Eggington, Linguistics and English LanguageDan Graham, PhilosophyLin Sherman, Spanish and Portuguese

publication of humanities at byuRon Woods, Editor, [email protected] Thorne, Managing EditorCaitlin Schwanger and Camille Hartwig, Editorial Assistants

college contactsKarmen Smith, Executive Secretary: 801-422-2779; [email protected] Kounanis, LDS Philanthropies at BYU: 801-422-8294; [email protected] Website: humanities.byu.edu

Brigham Young University College of Humanities 4002 JFSB, Provo, Utah 84602

Nonprofit OrganizationU.S. Postage

PAIDProvo, Utah

Permit No. 49

spring 2011

Documents

virtue of forgetfulness

ireneo funes

t i e s

strategic forgetfulness

maligned forgetfulness

end of education

sieve of memory

teeming world of funes