Item Detail
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29278
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3
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4
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English
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The Hermeneutics of Generosity : A Critical Approach to the Scholarship of Richard Bushman
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Journal of Mormon History
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Summer 2012
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38
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3
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Mormon History Association
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12-27
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In suggesting that Bushman does not subscribe to the school of suspicion, it is not my intention to paint him as a member of the school of reminiscence. The New Mormon History movement, with which we today associate him as a key member, was a reaction against just this kind of hermeneutical approach in Mormon history. The conflation of LDS memory with LDS history was very much the problem to which the movement responded, rejecting an affirming hermeneutics for a more skeptical, critical approach. The historiographies of polygamy, theocracy, and persecution have been extensively problematized through this movement’s importation of historical methods informed by academic social science. I would like to suggest, rather, that Bushman’s work falls into neither of the two approaches posited by Ricoeur but instead reflects what might be termed a “hermeneutic of generosity.” [From the text]