Criticism of Response To Internal Dissent
See also: Academic freedom at Brigham Young University and September SixThe Ostlings say that the LDS Church retaliates against members that publish information that undermines church policies, citing excommunications of scientist Simon Southerton and biographer Fawn M. Brodie. They further state that the church suppresses intellectual freedom, citing the 1993 excommunication of the "September Six", including gay LDS historian D. Michael Quinn, and author Lavina Fielding Anderson. The Ostlings write that Anderson was the first to reveal the LDS Church keeps files on LDS scholars, documenting questionable activities, and the Ostlings state that "No other sizable religion in America monitors its followers in this way".
The American Association of University Professors, since 1998, has put LDS-owned Brigham Young University on its list of universities that do not allow tenured professors sufficient freedom in teaching and research.
Richard Abanes lists the following as church members excommunicated or censured for views unacceptable to the church hierarchy:
- Journalist Deborah Laake, for her book Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond
- BYU English teacher Cecilia Konchar-Farr, for her views on abortion laws
- Writer Janice Merrill Allred
- English Professor Gail Houston
- Anthropologist David Knowlton
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Mormonism
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism, response, internal and/or dissent:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair—
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)