Post of the Day: Fundamentalism and Historical Criticism (from a few days back) by TT at FPR, arguing that fundamentalism (or, more generally, the conservative approach to religious belief and practice) is as much a product of the Enlightenment rationality project as are higher biblical criticism and liberal Protestantism. It's true that religious conservatives reject the priority of rationalism while religious liberals try hard to incorporate it, but they are both doing battle on Enlightenment turf. Of course, there is dispute over which of TT's five propositions actually apply to both fundamentalism and critical biblical studies (I'd say only 2 and 5).
Unwittingly following the same theme, a much more freewheeling discussion pitted personal revelation as a trump card (a conservative technique) against careful reading and exegesis of canonized texts (a critical studies approach). The debate started first at ZD in Women as Possessions (the relevant text being D&C 132; the post garnered 243 comments), then jumped to NCT in Of Course Personal Revelation Is Our Ultimate Trump Card (with 410 comments), then migrated back to ZD with What Sort of Trump Card Is Personal Revelation? (getting a mere 47 comments). Anyone who reads all 700 comments deserves a special prize. It's worth noting that the terms of the extended discussion are very much set by the Enlightenment rationality project that is the focus of TT's FPR post from the first paragraph.
Here are my one-sentence responses to each of the three posts in the Mother of All Comment Threads: (1) Of course women aren't possessions; who cares what it says in D&C 132? (2) Until you can give an objective definition of "personal revelation" there is no real substance to the proposition that it is an epistemological trump card. (3) It's not an epistemological trump card, it's just a way of saying "I'm right because God told me so" using fancier terminology.
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