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Back a little bit to the apologetic enterprise. Do you see it as more of a calling that every religion needs its defenders or what not?

Versus, I guess, how does it differ from scholarship? To me, there's the rhetorical piece, even the farm statement of who they are, we're studying this stuff, but it's based upon the conclusion that this stuff's real.

That's the paradigm within which we work. Partly, I think it's a fruitful paradigm within which to work. Assume that it's true and see how it functions. If it seems to function well, then that adds to the possibility of the prior assumption.

But I'd say, first of all, I don't think you can divide apologetics from scholarship very neatly because all scholarship, if it means anything, unless it's just unutterably trivial, all scholarship is going to be advocating a position.

I'm taking this piece of evidence over that one.

I take this thesis and I argue for it. If you criticize it, unless I abandon it altogether, I'm going to defend it.

You'll have apologetics going on. Apologetics is simply an advocacy or a defensive position. Once you've staked one out, you've got to defend it or abandon it.

In that sense, it's not such a clear division to me.

But as I say, I don't think that you can say that what we do here is start with a conclusion and then reason back because we don't start with a conclusion necessarily that there's chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

That's not a faith proposition. You discover it, at least you think you do, and then you argue, you show examples of it, and then you draw a conclusion from that.

But my faith wouldn't be impacted if in fact there were no chiasms in the Book of Mormon. Nothing in Mormonism hinges on that.

So, how do I think about it? In a sense, I would say, yeah, for me it is a kind of calling. Now, let me be perfectly clear here.

There are people out there who think the brethren have assigned me to do this. They have not.

In fact, to be perfectly honest, the university hasn't either. When I first came to BYU, I was told, don't write on Mormon subjects.

Well, one of the reasons I wanted to come to BYU was to write on Mormon subjects, and I disregarded that council.

I'm happy to say that I've gotten away with it by and large. Some people haven't. There are some places on campus that are less congenial than my college happens to be.

For doing this. For doing this. There are some people who simply aren't being allowed to do it under a particular administrator or something.

You know, you hope things will change when that demonstrated departs, retires, whatever.

So, it's not like the university orders me to do it. They don't. They never have. And no part of my salary goes toward writing apologetics.

If I didn't write a line, I'd get paid the same. Presumably I would write more Islamic stuff. And I might get paid more. It's conceivable.

If anything, I may have taken a hit. I don't know that I have, but I might have. You never know what goes into setting the salary, the thinking of the administrators in any given year.

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