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Hello and welcome to A Thoughtful Faith Podcast. We're here with our guest Kirk Coddle and we just spent the first hour kind of getting really good idea and background of Kirk in his time growing up in the church and his real formative years in Mormon studies and studying religion and kind of a lot of work.

We're here with Kirk and the time leading up to his time at BYU Idaho. Some really interesting stuff that we are able to learn about Kirk and setting us up for what happened over the course of the last few months at BYU Idaho.

Kirk, I just kind of want to dive into that. You actually go through some of the specifics of the lecture that you gave that kind of got you into hot water.

So maybe set up the background behind that and take us through kind of that discussion that you had with students. Maybe send it back and forth that you had with some of the students and how that led to kind of the situation that we'll talk about later.

Okay. Well, first off is there's a predetermined curriculum that is followed for the BYU online courses. So every week I have certain kind of things that I'm supposed to grade and the assignments are all predetermined and all of these other kind of things.

Generally, we'll have some sort of discussion board and I'm also required to have an hour office hour every week. So where students can come to see me and this office is a virtual office.

And it's kind of cool because it's kind of this little public form place where students can log on and there's auto video capability. So I can have a bunch of people come in and I can go on webcam and mic and I can just kind of talk or they can call me or whatever.

So once in a while.

Students would have some kind of question or something that would be a little tense general to the lesson at hand.

And when that would happen, I'd say, hey, just come to my office hours and we'll discuss that or you know, give me a car sometime and we'll discuss that.

If enough students have questions about something or really say, hey, Brother Coddle, can you do a lecture on this? And I'd say, okay, come to my office hours and we'll do this.

So one of these kind of times happened during my last semester with BYU.

We was kind of at the beginning of the semester and we were talking about the first presidency and there was something in the manual that said

when the profit dies that the corn dissolves and the senior most apostle takes over to be present in the church.

Non-controversial enough and you know, I don't have any problem with that. That's the way it goes.

And then somebody brought the question. They said, oh, is that always been the way it was? And I said something as the effect of, yeah, that's the way it's always, that's the way it's been except for at the beginning.

It didn't really go like that between Joseph Smith and Brigadier Myeong and then people like, oh, that'd be an interesting thing to know more about or something.

I don't remember, but it was something like that. Pretty non-shelon and I said, hey, well, if anybody wants to know more about this, come to my office hour and I will talk about it.

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