I’m not sure I’d agree with that. I’d say that most of my opinions on how I’ll teach my children arose from when I was single. And a goodly number of those from discussions in church. That’s not to criticize how you focused the lesson. I’ve done the same thing with the same lesson topic. Merely that I think we err if we assume that lessons on child rearing are inapplicable in a singles ward. (Speaking as one who spent a much longer time in singles wards than most)

Actually Clark, that’s not true. This is exactly my point about the manuals and what we talk about in Church. You *believe* what the prophets say are very similar and are repeated by subsequent prophets because that’s the image we’ve been presented with.

The reality is, the words of Joseph Smith are radically different from the words of David O. McKay. Sure, all prophets bear testimony of Jesus and the atonement, but even how that’s been done has changed a great deal over the years. The evolution of doctrine over the years is truly incredible, and worth examining, I believe.

For example, we Latter-day Saints pride ourselves on knowing that Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, is really Jesus. The truth of course is, no Church leader taught that until the late 19th century. Joseph Smith never once said Jesus and Jehovah are the same person. Quite the contrary, in fact. Brigham Young appears to have believed that Elohim was God the grandfather, Jehovah was God the father, and Jesus was God the Son. We owe George Q. Cannon and Franklin Richards to our belief in Jesus/Jehovah. Aren’t these differences worth examining in class? Couldn’t appreciating the differences between Church leaders help us remain more open-minded to different doctrinal possibilities?

Couldn’t knowing that both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young taught very different things about the Word of Wisdom than Heber J. Grant help us appreciate why President Grant re-emphasized and refocused the Word of Wisdom?

The whole manual issue was made evident to me several years ago when blowing the dust off of Nibley’s “An Approach to the Book of Mormon” and discovering (in the small print at the beginning of the book) that its two halves (Lehi in the Desert and The World of the Jaredites) were Melchizedek Priesthood manuals in like the 1950s. Wow, once upon a time lessons had content as opposed to rehash.

Somehow consistency, correlation, and the quest for peasant-like gospel simplicity has displaced other values which once directed the selection of curriculum materials.

I guess I see it as a negative because it means we’re learning the same things over and over again. Church feels like repeating the third grade 50 times.

I suppose my point with the priesthood manual is why bother separating it into the teachings of the prophets? Why study the teachings of Harold B. Lee if his teachings are exactly the same as Heber J. Grant? I suppose it’s just a matter of shattered expectations. The teachings of the prophets could have been really great, but now it’s no different than any other manual we’ve had.

Oh, and FWIW, President Benson’s pride talk was ghost written. He didn’t write it and remember, he didn’t read it either – he was too sick. But that’s another topic.

I think the Church has taken the most pragmatic course of action in trying to maintain cohesion in such a centralized Church. If the Church had a more evangelical structure to it, such correlation would presumably be unnecessary since local leaderships could set the agendas and the direction of their local congregations, and the congregations themselves could steer doctrine in the direction that they saw fit. The problem is, such a structure does not “fit” with the idea of a Church directed by living prophets; or at least, it is incongruent in this dispensation of living prophets. But this also happens to be the dispensation in which we enjoy the promise that we will not fall into apostacy again (at least in macro). So maybe correlation is actually playing a role in that particular bigger picture, even if the result is the intellectually unstimulating Sunday School lessons (when teaching from e.g. FARMS publications would be so much more interesting, in my opinion).

I agree that Correlation might have to modify its approach in a pragmatic way as the Church progresses. I don’t think that it currently is quite as watered down as you hinted with that Brigham Young example!

But you are right, in some wards turning over GD to a lecture by the teacher could be disastrous. The problem is that for those who have studied the scriptures, outside material, perhaps served a mission, it seems natural that that type of lecture could take place, and yet many a GD teacher hasn’t even read the BoM all the way through. I am certainly shocked by some of the comments that come up in my GD class. They range from incredible inaccuracy about the simplest BoM stories that even my 3 year old daughter could recite relatively accurately to huge misconceptions about the world around us. For example, yesterday in GD a well-intentioned commentor decided to get political and said that the Iraq war was wrong because we have to think about the feelings of all the saints in the stakes in Iraq and Afghanistan! I guess my point is that being uninformed extends a lot further than some of these people’s gospel knowledge.

Regarding your ward, I’m willing to guess I’d agree there is a problem. I’d just bet that the problem is with the teachers and not with the manuals. That’s basically my point. Heavens in our ward we’ve had teachers that were positively painful and made me want to skip Sunday School. But considering a few months earlier I was teaching from the same manual with no problems, I’m loath to blame the manuals.

http://www.libertypages.com/clark/Intros/agencyshape.html

Admittedly the Heidegger example is more extreme, but I’m fairly confident that most people would be bored reading the typical Nibley book. Further Nibley tends to introduce a lot of flawed thinking in his books. That’s fine for a scholar, but I get nervous about it when it is injected into church.

(And for the record manuals that I am critical of, such as the D&C Institute manual I’m critical for the same reason – its comments on relativity and other science which it gets horribly wrong)

I just think that the topics people here now appear to be requesting for Sunday School or Priesthood are inappropriate there. I just don’t see how they relate to the *content* of the gospel.

That they can be interesting to some and worthy of study I’ll agree. That they are appropriate to put in a manual – especially a manual for some teacher ill equipped to deal with it – also seems clear.

Let’s be honest. Take your typical Sunday School teacher. Do you *really* think they ought to be let loose with one of Nibley’s books? I shudder to think about the misreadings and amount of false doctrine that would arise.

Now if *lessons* are repetitive it is because of crappy teachers. Teachers are supposed to teach oriented towards the needs of the students.

To me it seems like you are establishing my point: the problem is poor teachers.