Thoughts on Approaches to the Book of Mormon

A suggestive quote jumped out at me while I was reading for a very different project.  It proposed a lot of ideas and opened analytical paths about a passion of mine, Mormonism. 

It brought to mind immediately the endless arguments and hand-wringing among many Latter-day Saints about whether the Book of Mormon is an ancient American text, as it was claimed.  More about this, but first the quote. 

Missionaries and LDS Pilgrimages

A tall, redheaded guy in a BYU ball cap slowly wound with the line waiting to go through security at the Lima airport for national flights. He conversed in unusually fluent Spanish with a Peruvian guy about his same age dressed in an iteration of twenty-something style.

There was an easy camaraderie among them that you seldom see. Tourists (European looking people, or the groups of Japanese and Chinese) tend to stick to themselves while Peruvians have their own family and friendship relationships that clump in these too slow lines. These two guys fit together. There was just something that connected them that was more than an occasional or temporary relationship between a local guide and a foreigner.