A few weeks ago I received an email from our ward clerk that the meetinghouse library was weeding out all materials that had been deemed "not appropriate" for meetinghouse libraries. The offending items would be on display in the cultural hall for anyone interested in taking possession of any of them. Free books! You don't have to tell me twice.
So let me describe what I found that's no longer "appropriate" for a meetinghouse collection.
Well, we'll start with old paperbacks from the 1970s about the Osmonds. No surprise there.
Then there were a few LDS-themed novels. Okay, whatever.
Then came the good stuff. What really caught my eye were the Sunday School manuals and church history textbooks from the 1950s and doctrinal treatises by Neal A. Maxwell and Mark E. Petersen. I asked myself why these would no longer be "appropriate." All I can figure is that anything that was published in "pre-correlation" days had to go.
Anyway, I brought home a lot of this sort of stuff. Included was An Introduction to the Gospel by Lowell L. Bennion, published in 1955 by the Deseret Sunday School Union Board. I couldn't resist making a comparison between this and the latest edition of Gospel Principles, published by Intellectual Reserve, Inc., which I have been using in my Sunday School classes since day one as an investigator.
A lot of people lately have been talking about the movement toward "uncorrelated" Mormonism. If this is something that interests you, my advice is to talk to your meetinghouse librarian and see what might be available. Unless it's already been purged.
No comments:
Post a Comment