1.Actually, I wasn't planning to stick around to discuss the article here. If others wish to do so, obviously, that's entirely up to them.
2.I can see, NBZX, why you're a bit confused about the subject that I was addressing. Here is the opening post of this thread, written by me:
Daniel Peterson wrote:According to a private communication yesterday from the University of Pennsylvania's Victor Mair that was passed on to me, Paper 195, concerning "A Complex of Ritual and Ideology Shared by Mesoamerica and the Ancient Near East," written by John Sorenson and published in December 2009, continues to be an exceptionally popular item in that university's Sino-Platonic Papers series:
http://sino-platonic.org/Some here may find it of interest.
Go down to the list of all of the Sino-Platonic Papers and, looking at the number in the left-hand column, scroll down to #195.
This was, I confess, posted partially in response to Joey's incessantly repeated claim that nobody beyond Provo -- he seems to have an obsession with Provo, which is a relatively small Utah city immediately to the south of the town in which I myself live -- pays any attention to Mormon scholarship related to the Book of Mormon. That is Joey's big issue, and pretty much, during the years in which I've been aware of him, his
only issue. According to Victor Mair, though, Professor Sorenson's piece has received quite a bit of attention relative, at least, to the other items in the Sino-Platonic Papers.
I have since repented of responding to Joey. I've been down that road before, and see absolutely no point in it, so I was a bit irritated with myself for giving in to temptation in the face of his ceaseless jibes. Judging scholarship by how many people read it seems to me profoundly foolish, and, as I've noted, I just don't care that much about questions of popularity or even influence. Those are extrinsic measures, and, while they're important in their way, they aren't high on my priority list. I care about the intrinsic quality of scholarship.
The other (and much more important) purpose of the above post, of course, was simply to call the attention of readers here to Professor Sorenson's article. I thought some might find it worth a look. That general purpose is the whole reason that I returned to this board, and it's plainly going to take considerable care and vigilance on my part to ensure that I'm not sucked back into the endless and worthless personal squabbles and the like that caused me to leave this board in the first place and that have guaranteed that I won't return to the "Terrestrial Forum."
As the thread progressed, though, floatingboy suggested, in passing (and perhaps without really intending to do so), that Professor Sorenson has published no peer-reviewed scholarship. I wrote to point out that nobody here -- myself emphatically included -- has his complete bibliography, which would be necessary to establish such a claim. In fact, though, the notion appears quite plainly to be untrue. The
Katunob article --
even if nobody had ever read it after its publication -- appears to have been peer reviewed, and, as William James used to say, the only thing needed to disprove the proposition that all crows are black is to find a single
white crow. (Which is not, I hasten to add, to say that the
Katunob piece is his only peer-reviewed publication. Even if we arbitrarily exclude his FARMS or Maxwell Institute publications, several other peer-reviewed pieces [e.g., those chapters in the books from the university presses of Hawaii and Texas] have been mentioned already on this very thread.)