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Mormon Stories Podcast

274: LDS Church Chief Apologist -- Dr. Daniel C. Peterson Pt. 4

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2011

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Daniel C. Peterson is a professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University and currently serves as editor-in-chief of BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. He is a member of the executive council of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Peterson is known for his work as an apologist and scholar on subjects dealing with claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), of which he is a member. He has served as the editor of the FARMS Review, a periodical produced by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. Peterson is a regular participant in online fora about Mormonism where he discusses the LDS faith and its apologetics.[2] One of his most recent projects has been the development of a website featuring the testimonies of LDS scholars.[3]

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:12.8

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0:17.2

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0:21.9

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0:30.0

All right, here's what I want to do. This will be our final segment. Kind of a lightning

0:35.7

round of, you know, tough issues that apologists have to handle. I don't want to necessarily

0:42.9

do it to get, I want your answers, obviously, or at least to suggestion the answer. But the

0:47.8

whole idea here is to unpack the thinking process, the weighing process, the how I value,

0:55.9

you know, the idea that something really can break in, that's divine into the world versus

1:01.9

the cynicism of science and things like that. So are you okay for like, if I just like

1:08.3

throw out the tough? Okay, Joseph Smith and the interface with magic, Fulke magic, was

1:17.0

that an essential part of his training? How open would you be for that history to come

1:24.8

in a little closer, you know, needing to bring Emma to get the plates and the whole... Actually,

1:31.7

wrote some things about that early on when the salamander letter was a big deal and so on. And

1:35.9

first of all, I argued that the term magic was problematic. That you really can't distinguish

1:43.1

clearly between Fulke religion and magic. They blend and blur and any attempt to define magic that

1:49.6

doesn't include somebody's religion seems always to fail. And I actually spent some time on that.

1:54.3

I haven't done it in years, but I wrote a little bit about it. I even spent time for a couple

1:59.0

of months at Princeton in an NEH seminar on the concept of magic in the ancient world. And the

2:04.5

conclusion, the upshot of that seminar, which had anthropologists and classes and everything in it,

2:08.5

these are all academic, you know, PhDs, was that we could not come up with a definition of magic that

2:14.9

made any sense, that applied to everything that's been called magic, but didn't include religion of

...

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