Item Detail
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28872
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1
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3
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English
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Alma's Experiment in Faith : A Broader Context
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Fall 2011
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44
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3
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Stanford, CA
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Dialogue Foundation
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67-93
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The thesis of this paper is a modest one, namely, that reading the
Book of Mormon with an eye to its literary context significantly
enhances the reading experience regardless of whether one’s objective
is instruction, insight, aesthetics, or merely the pleasure of
discovering coherence in its various details.1 A necessary corollary
is that the Book of Mormon, as a text, is sufficiently crafted
to warrant such attentive effort. There is nothing remarkable
about the suggestion that internal context matters—that even a
minimal level of understanding of any scriptural passage requires
consideration not only of who is speaking, why, and to
whom, but also of how a particular verse fits into a larger argument
or interacts with nearby passages, or of how a discourse relates
to either its immediate or extended corresponding narrative.
But this is not the manner in which Latter-day Saints typically
read the Book of Mormon, either individually or as a community;
even as we make our way sequentially through the book, we
are much more likely to reflect upon isolated doctrinal prooftexts
or paraphrased narrative episodes.2