Download my Sunstone Talk!

This summer I flew out to Salt Lake City for the Sunstone Symposium, at which I presented a paper titled "Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis". It's now available for download from the Sunstone website for the low, low price of four dollars. You'll have to find it using the search function I just linked to; there's no direct link to the MP3 file. Here's the abstract of my paper:

Marvin Hill argued that early Mormonism was a flight from American religious pluralism. This paper puts a finer point on Hill's thesis by arguing that Joseph Smith felt that American pluralism resulted from a breakdown in the perspicuity (or clarity) of the Bible. It was hermeneutical pluralism that Smith regarded as the most imminent threat to the coherence of his family and of American society. The Restoration was an attempt to resolve this crisis by restoring the Bible's perspicuity.