But for me, for those of my generation? We came of age in an era of priesthood equality among the races. It’s largely not an issue, though many of us are embarrassed that it ever was one.

Today there is a new generation of scholars and readers coming of age. The events of the late 80’s and early 90’s are nearly two decades old. There is a rich history in Sunstone and Dialogue, a base that can be built upon and expanded, and a new generation of readers. The market is large enough to sustain these brands, and even to see these brands thrive, we simply need to grow them with good content and smart decisions.

Suffice it to say that I’m not too concerned about perceived damage to brands. We’ve survived much worse, and we’ve learned valuable lessons along the way.

I think that you are right about the problem of self-reinforcing conversations. As to the necessity of loyalty signals, perhaps it was inevitable, but I suspect that it mainly arose as a matter of historical acciddent. Sunstone and to some extent Dialogue have allowed themselves to serve as platforms for stinging and occasionally irresponsible attacks on the Church. I understand the logic of why they did so, and at some deep level I am on board with the lets-have-an-open-discussion approach. (I’ve even put in a little effort over the years to trying to foster more open Mormon discussions.) The historical fact of those attacks, however, and the Church’s (IMHO) overreaction to them, created the need for new publications to signal. It is an unfortunate reality in many ways and one that will, I think, ultimately disappaite as the late 1980s and early 1990s recede into the background. It may have irretrievably destroyed the Sunstone brand, which is sad but if true not ultimately a devestating blow to Mormon intellectual life. Intellectual discussions survive the decline of this or that publication with some regularity, and edgy but ultimately unfortunate editorial decisions have crippled more than one magazine in the past.

FWIW, I think that the JMH has limited its ideological exposure by having higher professional standards. This lowers the ideological temp. considerably. Sunstone, Exponent II, and Segullah — by virtue of their genre — cannot hide behind scholarly professionalism because they are not professional scholarly publications. My understanding, however, is that even the JMH has had its touch and go moments, which it weathered in part by aggressively insisting on ideological balance on its editorial board, although I have to admit that I’m just going off rumors here and can’t claim any special knowledge about the inner workings of the JMH. I do think that it is a great journal.

Oh, I get it now.

Well, our mission statement is printed on the inside cover of every issue, and is featured on our home page, and linked to from our blog, but I imagine a number of our readers have never noticed it. (Particularly those who read journal material via the blog.)

I’d just like to point out that issues of loyalty and orthodoxy over the quality of content aren’t confined to Mormon publications.

One of the most hilarious examples of this that I ever encountered was when I decided that since I was working on a teaching composition certificate to go with my comp lit degree, I should check out what the comp journals were like. Talk about signaling. I completely forget what the names of the two journals I looked at were, but one was all Freire and the other was all t-unit counts. Reading the titles in the tables of contents just cracked me up. And wow was the philosophical divide that I had been sensing from the faculty in the department laid bare.

So I personally like some signaling about orthodoxy. I may ignore them at times. But I like them to be there when I have limited resources or just am not in the mood. In fact, the third part in my series on LDS fiction; Mormon fiction is going to talk a bit about this.

Sure, I have pretty broad tastes and tolerances, but what really hits the sweet spot for me is work that is middle-of-the-road — what the AML has called broadly appropriate (and what I’m now calling the radical middle). And that’s even more true if I feel like the work is coming from a place of orthodoxy and belief (although note that for me that’s probably a wider definition than most Mormons but perhaps not quite as wide as everyone here). The truth is that if you are really interested in this field, you are going to have to read stuff that isn’t, maybe, quite up to par with the best of what the world has to offer. And we just don’t have the mechanisms in place that will help us sift through it all (for example, using a few sources I can usually tell if I’m going to like a particular piece of speculative fiction or not) — nor do we have enough market incentives to seriously ramp up the levels of production that could lead to more excellent work.

My point was that I don’t understand what Nate was saying about the importance of the signal itself, rather than the way the signalling is done. A casual reader who looks at Segullah won’t see a mission statement saying “We don’t mess with the Brethren”. Rather, it is something they will eventualy pick up on as they read. Since that cue is more or less implicit, it is ALL about the way you signal. And, as the two women I know, and as the woman Johnna knows demonstrate, that signalling is often more ambiguous than we would like, because there are people out there who find Segullah insufficiently orthodox. Whaddya gonna do?

But I get the feeling I am beating a dead horse here. We have established that there is a substantial amount of cross-pollination, and that you all don’t treat each other like pariahs. So I am a happy reader. Carry on, carry on, ye editors of the noble birthright!

In a way, this is part of the point I was trying to get at–I don’t think it speaks well of our intellectual culture that we make decisions based on signals about institutional loyalty or the perceived orthodoxy of the contributors, rather than on the quality of scholarship or artistic excellence of what’s between the covers. And if some significant fraction of the potential audience and helpful critics will never read what’s in publications outside of their comfort zone, everyone’s writing in an echo chamber. The people who would tell the Sunstone story writer that trying to be edgy by sneering at believers is a dead end won’t read it, and the clever but unorthodox academic who could help the Segullah writer get to a deeper truth will make the mistake of thinking orthodox Mormon women’s writing=treacle.

But maybe I’m wrong–do you see judgments about loyalty and orthodoxy, on the basis of clear branding, as (potentially) virtuous or merely inevitable?