Following on the state of the blog post and some recent comments on the wiki, I think there is some work we need to do to figure out the relationship between the blog and the wiki. The conclusion of this work will be conventions about how we use each and how the two work together at Feast upon the Word. Read the rest of this entry »

Lesson 5: John 3-4

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I’d like to follow up on the question of teaching 16-17 year-olds (perhaps since that’s what I do), but you can all “apply” this post and the following comments to your everyday teaching callings. Matt W. said:

“I am only 30, but feel completely out of touch with the Youth. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in the church and I haven’t had TV or bought a new CD in 7 years… I have definitely resolved that I want to be siginificant and not entertaining. I can not entertain the youth better than they can entertain themselves.”

I’m very sympathetic to Matt’s sentiment here (last summer I had to face the scorn of a dozen teachers and priests when I packed Camus’ The Stranger and the Oresteia on our four-day hike; which is not to mention that whenever I ask a “But what is x?” question in priests quorum, at least one student shoots back with “What is Joe?”–a phrase that I’ve recently found is my name in most of the priests’ cell phone directories!). Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll all forgive the fun I had writing that title, but it does serve a purpose: the ideas I’d like to discuss in this thread are heavily influenced by an article by Jean-Louis Chretien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”. In fact, let me begin with his last paragraph Read the rest of this entry »

The Story
Last week in Gospel Doctrine class we were discussing the wise men. A student asked, “Do we even know anything about who these guys were?” No one in the class wanted to take up the discussion, so I offered my ideas:

“The Greek word used here is magi, which refers to men who were astrologers. Why would God use this type of person to testify of his Son?”

In the discussion that followed, one of the class members quoted from the LDS Bible Dictionary:

“Who these men were we are not told, but it is certain they were not ordinary men. That they were privileged to search out the Son of God and give him gifts, and that they were spiritually sensitive and knowledgeable, suggests that they were actually prophets on a divine errand. The customary identification of them as astrologers is a gross misrepresentation. They evidently were holy men from a land east of Palestine.” (emphasis added) Read the rest of this entry »

Robert recently mentioned two opposite extremes into which LDS classrooms too often tend to fall. On one extreme is the “merely” academic classroom: the materials (scriptures) are studied for studying’s sake (study pour l’study). In this classroom, the scriptures become just one among so many academic disciplines, and while the students are undeniably engaged, they are generally so because of the “intellectual rigor” of the class, not because of the Spirit, etc. At the other extreme one enters the classroom where the materials (scriptures) are reduced over and over again to “what we all know already.” In this classroom, the scriptures become a forced witness to our collective wisdom and our obvious piety, something we read to recognize how much we know (if only other poor souls were so wise, so righteous, so faithful). I think we’ve all seen both of these extremes (in their extreme forms and in their not-quite-so-extreme forms where they still fail to serve anything like God’s purposes). If I’m following Robert’s comments well, he suggests that our ally in banishing these two extremes is “application.” I think I agree with him, but only if I can make some radical revisions to our thinking about “application.” Read the rest of this entry »

As this blog approaches its one-month birthday, we made a few changes to the blog’s look (actually, I deserve pretty much all of the blame for this set of changes, though Matthew gets credit for setting everything up initially). If you have any suggestions for improvement on the blog’s look or, more importantly, the blog’s content, future directions, etc., this thread is a good opportunity to let us know. First, let me ramble a bit about the purpose and intent of the Feast blog and the Feast wiki, then I’ll give a few technical details about the current look of the blog and where I see things going in the future.

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I thought I’d post a quick note to follow up on my first EQ lesson from the Kimball manual. In thinking about this follow up I started looking at an old question with renewed interest. How do you know if a lesson has been successful? Or how does one measure the relative success of a lesson? Read the rest of this entry »

Lesson 4: Matthew 3-4; John 1:35-51 Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere on the blog, the question was raised about the role of the student in the classroom. Several comments were made about how to be a good student. But it got me thinking about how the teacher thinks about the student, and how that perception ultimately affects one’s teaching style. How does/can/ought a teacher think about the student’s role? Discuss.