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Preach My Gospel 2nd Edition: A Transformational Improvement

2023 Preach My Gospel Mission Program Changes  On June 22, 2023, the LDS Church announced the release of the second edition of the Preach My Gospel (PMG) missionary manual.   While organized to cover similar topics to the 2004 Preach My Gospel manual , the second edition involves extensive revision with some sections almost entirely rewritten.  PMG 2.0 materially and substantially addresses many of the challenges cited in my November 2022 JMSSA article . Some of the key changes are as follows.  Missionaries are instructed that their success is determined by their own efforts and not by the agency of others, and to engage in sincere discipleship and service  (Chapter 1).   Baptism is presented as ‘a point along the path of conversion” and not as a “final destination” (Chapter 3). Rather than intending the prior “short versions” of discussions to be adequate teaching of each lesson, the second edition notes that missionaries “will usually need multiple mee...
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Principles of Scholarly Review

The Anna Karenina Principle “All happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus begins Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina. By this Tolstoy meant that several key qualities were necessary for a marriage to be happy. The  Anna Karenina Principle  has been applied to other areas to indicate that multiple specific qualities must be present for an enterprise or process to succeed. Much as a skilled athlete or proficient musician makes difficult tasks look natural and almost effortless to the casual observer, the processes of a quality scholarly review are may escape the casual reader. As we learn from the  Anna Karenina Principle , a review that does not meet the required standards does not function as a piece of scholarship. Merely completing a university education or publishing scholarly articles does not qualify one as a competent reviewer. Even established scholars sometimes underestimate the skill and competenc...
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