http://www.johnadamscenter.com/2012/05/ ... o-critics/

This controversy with Ralph Hancock who is Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University and his going after Joanna Brooks has been under the radar compared to the Maxwell Institute's unpublished hit piece on John Dehlin.

What I find interesting about this situation is how closely it resembles the more popular story with John and MI. I think there may be a retrenchment going on among the conservative Mormon scholars and they want to nip the move towards a more centrist type of Mormonism in the bud.

This might be one of those watershed moments in Mormon history. From my limited observation, it seems BYU has moved quite a bit further to the right since I attended in the early 1980s. But then most of America has become reactionary.

As a prophet, I see the conservatives winning this battle.

Nope. We haven't missed this nugget. In fact I referenced it as being part of a coordinated initiative against liberal Mormons. Thanks for giving it its own thread though.

His articles seems to be a long drawn out way of saying, 'Joanna Brooks doesn't agree with all the church teaches.'

I also found the ending to be a little bizarre.



An election cycle probably wasn't the best time to start infighting between the orthodox and the unorthodox members of the church.

Thanks Kish. I should have realized the folks here never miss anything!

Thank God they have no women on their board because that would be wrong.

I just hope that no woman envies them their foundation, because that would be wrong too, but for reasons that entirely escape Ralph "The Weenie" Hancock.

This review is one of the most God-awful, poorly written messes I have read in a long time.

I will give a more thorough critique a little later, after I get ready for work.

I thought the following comment was the unintentional highlight of the whole page:



I guess Mike was presiding over his wife's keyboard use. You gonna cut her meat for her too there Cal?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiUhh8Xv--E

As I stated earlier, this is the most poorly written, God-awful mess of a review I have read in a long time. Hancock should be utterly embarrassed. It reads like he had a thesaurus sitting next to him, and was consulting it for exactly how many "big words" he could cram into a given paragraph.

As man of you here know, grammatically incorrect writing affects me like nails on a chalkboard. I am not as much of a stickler as Shades, particularly when it comes to message board content. However, in formal, published writing, there is absolutely no excuse.

Let me just get the most glaring mistake out of my system, and then I will begin a commentary on the content:



(bold emphasis mine)

Really, Hancock? You don't know the difference between a principal and a principle? You or your editor couldn't have caught that one?

Pardon my intrusion, liz, but wouldn't the principal author of a blog be a "principal" and not a "principle"? Ralph "The Weenie" Hancock may be wrong about many things, but I don't think this is one of them.

Hmmm...maybe I misread what he was trying to say. I thought he was referring to principles, as in items of discussion of the blogs, rather than the authors themselves.

Was this a freudian slip, given the subject matter of the thread?

Thanks,

Hasa Diga Eebowai

LOL! Thanks for pointing that out. I don't claim to be perfect. Also, as I said previously, message board mistakes are not as grating to me. We are basically typing very fast here, and we tend to type more as we speak...we are basically carrying on written conversations.

But this was an article for print.

Now, it looks like I may have misread what the author meant, and that he did use the correct verbiage. However, I still stand by the fact that he used about five times the space to get his point across.

He is also blatantly wrong in a lot of his blanket labeling, but that is another issue I will address.