Mormon Story Sunday School is a production of Mormon Stories Podcasts in the Open Stories Foundation.

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Welcome to class, everyone. I am very excited to begin the inaugural episode of Mormon Stories Sunday School.

My name is Jared Anderson and I will be the host and teacher of this podcast more on what that entails later.

I was going to jump right into the gospel doctrine lessons and let the website content

speak for the organization. But some of my friends convinced me that having an introductory

episode that lays everything out in an audio format would also be beneficial. So here we are.

What we are going to do in this brief introduction is I am going to introduce myself,

give a brief overview of the podcast and tell the story of how it came to be. It's kind of a funny story.

I will talk about the goals and vision of this project. Then we will talk about the two components of this

podcast, engaging gospel doctrine and excavating scripture.

I want to be very clear about the goal and the tone of this project. And then I will say a little bit about each of the components.

So as I said, my name is Jared Anderson. I have been quite involved in the Mormon Stories community this past year.

I am finishing up my PhD in religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bart Irman is my advisor. He's about as known as it gets when it comes to being a New Testament scholar.

My research interests are the history of the Bible, how it was formed, collected, transmitted interpretation.

And I'm also very interested in larger issues of religion and especially the future of religion.

So how this podcast came to be, it didn't begin in August of 2011.

And that is when the wonderful John Delin sent me a Facebook message and he said, hey, I have an idea.

It's a weekly podcast. It's going to be named uncorrelated Mormon Sunday school. You're going to host it.

And it's going to be a weekly Sunday school lesson, discussion of scriptures, work through all the scriptures, bring people in.

...