Thinking Otherwise: A Conversation with James Faulconer
Channel: Maxwell Institute
Date: 26/05/2021

Not everyone wants to do theology as undertaken in Jim Faulconer’s Thinking Otherwise: Theological Explorations of Joseph Smith’s Revelations. Theology, which Faulconer defines as thoughtful reflections on the authoritative teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—in other words, its doctrines. As he says, “Almost no one needs to. Even when one has good reason for doing it, there is no question that theological thinking takes a back seat to doing. Trust in the Lord means doing things, not only believing them or figuring out how one belief relates to another. Trust in God means caring for the poor and oppressed as one among them, bearing one another’s burdens (see, e.g., Psalm 146:5–7; Isaiah 1:17; Mosiah 18:8–9; 3 Nephi 24:5). It means being baptized and keeping covenant with God and our fellows in the way we live our lives. We cannot claim either to trust God or to worship him if the practices of our religion are not central to our understanding of it. As true as that is, there are nevertheless occasions when one needs to do theology.”
We hope you enjoy this conversation between James Faulconer and Steven C. Harper!

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James E. Faulconer is a Latter-day Saint philosopher and senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Faulconer received his B.A. in English from BYU. He then received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University. His area of interest in philosophy is contemporary European philosophy, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger and late 20th- and early 21st-century French thinkers, particularly as that work bears on religious experience. Dr. Faulconer is author of the Maxwell Institute’s “Scriptures Made Harder” series (2013–2015) and other books such as Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions (1999), Faith, Philosophy, and Scripture (2010), and The Life of Holiness: Notes and Reflections on Romans 1, 5–8 (2012).
Steven C. Harper is a professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. In 2013 Steve was appointed as the managing historian and general editor of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. He was named editor in chief of BYU Studies Quarterly in September 2019. He earned a bachelor's degree from BYU, an MA in American history from Utah State University, and a PhD in early American history from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He began teaching courses in religion and history at BYU Hawaii in 2000 and joined the Religious Education faculty at BYU in 2002. That year he also became a volume editor of The Joseph Smith Papers and the document editor for BYU Studies. He taught at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2011-2012. He is also the author of several books, including Making Sense of the Doctrine and Covenants (Deseret Book, 2008) and First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (Oxford University Press, 2019), along with dozens of articles.
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