I almost fear bringing up Dutcher again since some of his perhaps ill chosen comments in various interviews have certainly polarized many of his target audience. In the latest Sunstone though they have a new interview with him that is quite interesting. I know most of you won’t read the interview and I’m not interested in summarizing it. I will say it’s a nice counter-point to his Christianity Today Interview that engendered so much discussion. I think he certainly phrased things there in at best some odd ways. But that’s not what I wanted to discuss. Rather I wanted to discuss a couple of paragraphs from his interview that were a criticism of Utah County that I found extremely true and cutting.

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Can any of you ward clerk types out there tell me what information I can get out of the church’s membership record management system, and in what format? What I’m after is something like first name, last name, street address, city, state, zip, either tab-delimited, .csv, or other simple text file format. Our ward clerk is great, but from a generation that doesn’t speak XML.

You can post in comments below (it might be nice to get a discussion on how people use the church’s tools), or you can email me directly at bryce at millennialstar dot org.

Comments still out of order? Check. Things in sidebar are broken? Check.

Let me know what’s broken for you. I’ll try to get things more or less in order tonight.

For those bloggernacle denizens limping along with their free Blogger blogs, life is about to get much better. Google is upgrading Blogger after a long period of neglect. Bloggers rejoice!

Here’s the tour of new features.

After teaching my first Gospel Doctrine class, I found myself in a conversation with the previous instructor, who was preparing to leave for a mission. He was the stake president when we first moved into the ward ten years ago, and is a man whose opinion I value. I asked him for feedback on my lesson that morning. He smiled and told me that I did a great job, and not to worry. I pressed him a bit more. I figured that after the first lesson is the best time to get honest criticism, as I could chalk up any problems to mere inexperience, as opposed to sheer incompetence.

He thought for a second and then said, “There is one thing.

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