/lit/ - Literature

>>22312613
1/2 Not really but I may write one over the next ten years. The best you can do is track what's been said in scattered places. Note that "what's been said" isn't enough: but to determine the variety of opinions and get a better idea of what's more established vs. more speculative, you need a complete lay of the land. But you need to investigate a lot of literature to do this. That includes the LDS scriptures, the rest of the JST, the Lectures on Faith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, History of the Church, Journal of Discourses, various conference talks and other talks by the leaders since that time, and other documentary work best compiled by the Church historians (like the Joseph Smith Papers, various personal journals and private minutes of the church leaders, etc), etc. There's secondary and tertiary literature on this stuff too. The latter is pretty easily available, if you browse the Mormon blogosphere or the apologetic articles on FAIR. For secondary literature you'll want to look into articles on Sunstone, and various books speculating about Mormon theology, ranging from published articles once again, by Mormon academic philosophers, to autodidact amateurs using vanity presses. Frankly Mormon hermeneutics is a very fertile field because the corpus is extensive. Mormons from the beginning emphasized extensive record keeping, and despite a period in the mid-1900s where they were unwilling to discuss the more unsavory bits, they've trended toward even greater transparency since then, and actually have endeavored to make the stuff even more available than before. But even when it wasn't so available, it was never destroyed: the church historians were tasked with studying it and keeping it filed, making official evaluations of it, etc. Frankly OP, Mormonism if studied as part of the history of ideas and as a body of scattered religious literature is very fascinating, but I'm biased I guess. So don't take that judgment from me, take it from the non-Mormon /lit/erati Harold Bloom himself (con't)

>>18646447
Yes it is.