Dennis Robbins

Conviction, Not Convenience: Wes Huff’s Case for Why He Remains Protestant and Not Roman Catholic

Posted on May 21, 2026May 21, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

The Governing Principle: Sufficiency, Not Mere Necessity A summary and theological reflection Wesley “Wes” Huff is a Christian apologist, speaker, and scholar shaped by a global upbringing spanning Pakistan, the Middle East, and Canada. After overcoming a life-altering neurological condition at age eleven that left him temporarily paralyzed, he developed a perspective that deeply informs…

Brigadier of the Daughter of Zion: The Rise and Ruin of Mormonism’s First Danite

Posted on May 20, 2026May 20, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — FIFTEENTH INSTALLMENT Sampson Avard and the Education of a Holy Vengeance Introduction: A Man Looking at the Sky On the last day of October 1838, a tall, restless physician stood near the unfinished temple lot at Far West, Missouri, and turned his face toward heaven. The autumn light was hard and…

The LDS Counselor Who Said No: William Law, the Conscience of Nauvoo, and the Single Page That Toppled a Prophet

Posted on May 20, 2026May 20, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — FOURTEENTH INSTALLMENT He Proved a Prophet Wrong with the Prophet’s Own Bible. ❦ ❧ ❦ On the warm evening of June 10, 1844, a column of nearly one hundred men marched through the streets of Nauvoo, Illinois, toward a modest brick print shop. They carried a sledgehammer. Inside stood a single…

The Potter’s Clay: The Strange and Strenuous Faith of Heber C. Kimball

Posted on May 19, 2026May 19, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — INSTALLMENT XIII The Blunt Apostle Who Helped Build the Kingdom in the Mountains ❦ ❦ ❦ A Light in the Eastern Sky On a clear September night in 1827, in the rural quiet of Mendon, New York, a young potter was roused from his bed by a neighbor pounding at his…

LDS Member on Facebook Wins the “Nice Try But No Cigar” Award.

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

Nice try, but no cigar (and its popular variation, “close, but no cigar”) is an American idiom that originated in early 20th-century carnivals. Fairground barkers handed out real cigars as prizes for winning games of skill. If a participant failed to win, the barker would declare they were close but missed out on the prize….

The Washington Post is a classic example of: “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black.”

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

A Study in Media Hypocrisy. Summarize the content of this news story: Inside Ben Shapiro’s MAGA meltdown. Drew Harwell The Daily Wire was once ascendant in right-wing media. Now, the “anti-woke” company faces contentious layoffs, ideological battles and dwindling relevance online. The conservative media company Daily Wire was once a star of the MAGA digital…

From AmericanThinker.com: Minnesota’s house of fraud – Yes, Minnesota’s top officials knew.

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

AmericanThinker.com: Is there a limit to how much corruption we will put up with? By the looks of things, apparently not. In Minnesota, recently incarcerated Aimee Bock, the woman behind the quarter billion dollar “Feeding Our Future” fraud scandal, spoke to Fox News from her new prison digs, and stated what should be painfully obvious: Top Minnesota…

The Lion of the Quorum: Wilford Woodruff, the Chronicler-Apostle Who Bent Mormonism Toward Modernity

Posted on May 18, 2026May 18, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — INSTALLMENT XII Restoration’s Quiet Architect: A Christian Reckoning With Wilford Woodruff A Door Opens at Benbow Farm On the cool English morning of March 5, 1840, a thin, bearded American walked up the lane to a prosperous Herefordshire estate called Hill Farm and knocked on the door. He had not slept…

Joey Sampaga: The Divine Divider & The Coming Fire, Luke 12:49-59

Posted on May 18, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

Delivered by Pastor Joey | East Valley International Church | Gilbert, Arizona Text: Luke 12:49-59 (ESV) Abstract and summary of the pastor’s sermon: The Divine Divinity and the Coming Fire — Luke 12:49–59 This sermon, preached through the Gospel of Luke, dismantles the culture’s soft, romanticized portrait of Jesus and replaces it with the Christ…

EVIC Sunday School – Lesson 2: How the Bible Was Made and Preserved

Posted on May 18, 2026May 26, 2026 by Dennis Robbins

Lesson 2 The Journey of How the Bible Was Made and Preserved Lesson 2 of our six-week study is designed to deepen confidence in the Bible by tracing the remarkable path it traveled to reach modern hands. This Bible study traces how the Old Testament was formed through prophetic authority, translated into Greek as the…

2 Corinthians 11:13-15: For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.

Romans 3:20-24: For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,

Email: dennis@novus2.com

Custer’s ‘Lone Survivor’ and Other Tall Tales: Who Was Arizona Bill?
The Tangled Life and Tall Tales of Raymond Hatfield Gardner — “Arizona Bill” (1845–1940) ❖ ————❖———— ❖ On a gray winter morning in 1940, an old man lay dying in the charity ward of a San Antonio hospital. He had no money, no verifiable family, and, the Army insisted, no record of ever having […]
Where the Desert Comes to Life: Inside Life Time Ocotillo — Gilbert, Arizona’s New Athletic Country Club
More Than a Gym: How Life Time Ocotillo Is Redefining Wellness in the Southeast Valley ❖ ❖ ❖ There is a particular hour in the Sonoran Desert when the heat finally breaks. The sun slides west behind the San Tan Mountains, the saguaros throw long shadows across the gravel, and the whole valley […]
The Woman Who Wore the Star: America’s First Female Marshal
The Improbable Life of Phoebe Couzins — Lawyer, Lawwoman, and the West’s Unlikeliest Pioneer 1842 – 1913 ❦ ❖ ❦ A Star Pinned to a Silent Blouse On a raw December morning in 1913, six mourners gathered at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis to bury a woman the nation had once strained to hear. […]
Death in Tunnel 13: The DeAutremont Brothers and the Birth of American Forensic Science
Image: Wanted poster, distributed June 1, 1924. Courtesy Southern Oregon Historical Society 1988.11-8.5, MS 672 (via Smithsonian) A Narrative History of the West’s Last Great Train Robbery ❖ ❖ ❖ On the morning of October 11, 1923, engineer Sidney Bates had exactly one day of work left in him. […]
FROM A PUSHCART BY THE TRACKS: The Improbable Rise of Dutch Bros Coffee
A Narrative History of Brotherhood, Loss, and a Coffee Empire Built on Kindness The railroad tracks ran through downtown Grants Pass like a seam stitched into the floor of southern Oregon, and on a gray morning in 1992, two brothers wheeled a pushcart up beside them and waited to see whether anyone […]
THE LAW WEST OF THE PECOS: Judge Roy Bean and the Strange Equity of the Frontier
The True Story of the Hanging Judge Who Never Hanged Anyone A Saloon on the Edge of the Map Picture the place first, because the place explains the man. Three hundred miles of the Chihuahuan Desert lie between San Antonio and El Paso, and somewhere out in the middle of that emptiness, the Pecos […]
The Long Roll Call of Liberty: A 250-Year Narrative of American Freedom
An American Journey Through Liberty ❖ ❖ ❖ Introduction: A Republic Still Being Written On the reverse of the parchment Declaration of Independence, in a plain clerk’s hand, someone wrote a single docket line so the document could be identified when it was rolled up for storage: “Original […]
The Gospel of the Gun: John Wesley Hardin and the Myth of the Frontier Shootist
The True Story of John Wesley Hardin: A Narrative History (1853 ~ 1895) ✦ ✦ ✦ A Preacher’s Son in a Burning Land He was named for a man who spent his life trying to save souls, and he spent his own taking lives. The irony was not lost on the people of Texas, and it would not be lost on the […]
Born to Save the World: Tom Cruise, Scientology, and the Smile That Sells
Stardom, Faith, and the Price of the Hero Myth ❖ ❖ ❖ Introduction: The Man Who Refused to Fall On a warm August evening in 2024, a sixty-two-year-old man leapt from the roof of the Stade de France, abseiled into a packed Olympic stadium, took an American flag from a gymnast and a mayor, and rode […]
Chick Corea, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Long Argument Between Belief and Art
Between the Keys and the Cosmos Prelude: A Child at the Piano When Armando Anthony Corea first sat down at the piano, he was four years old, and the instrument had been set before him by his father, a Boston trumpeter who led a Dixieland band in the 1930s and 1940s. That domestic scene—an […]
Joey Sampaga: The Courageous Compassion of Christ, Luke 13:31-35
Delivered by Pastor Joey | East Valley International Church | Gilbert, Arizona Text: Luke 13:31-35 (ESV) Abstract and summary of the pastor’s sermon: The Courageous Compassion of Christ — Luke 13:31-35 This sermon on Luke 13:31–35 casts Jesus as utterly ungovernable by human threats and […]
Letters To A Mormon Elder: Chapter 8
Letter 8 — The Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham Vision Letters To A Mormon Elder by James R. White Thursday, July 5 Dear Elder Hahn, I received your note yesterday morning. I have considered just how to respond, and feel that I should indeed continue on and address the topic of the Book […]
EVIC Sunday School – Lesson 4: How the Bible Was Made and Preserved
Lesson 4 The Incredible Cost of Preservation of the Bible Introduction and Purpose of the Study Our study is a six-week informational series intended to strengthen the class’s confidence in the Bible as God’s Word before transitioning to a longer “real-life discipleship” […]
EVIC Sunday School – Lesson 5: How the Bible Was Made and Preserved
Lesson 5 The Dramatic Journey of the Bible to Modern Believers Introduction and Purpose of the Study Our study series has been to strengthen the class’s confidence in the Bible as God’s Word before transitioning to a longer “real-life discipleship” study. The aim is not deep […]
“Ye Shall Be as Gods”: The Serpent’s Promise as the Blueprint of LDS Cosmology
The Garden’s Oldest Whisper: How LDS Cosmology Repackages Genesis 3:5 ❦ ❦ ❦ I. The Architecture of an Older Whisper Of all the doctrines a religion must defend, the doctrine of God is the one upon which everything else turns. As Latter-day Saint Apostle Dallin H. Oaks once told an audience at […]
Restoration or Appropriation? How Mormonism Borrows Its Bible, Its Art, and Its Credibility from “Apostate” Churches
The LDS Church claims to be the only true restoration of Christianity, Yet it can’t stop borrowing from the very traditions it condemns. Image: Side‑by‑side, it’s hard to miss! If this is a uniquely “restored” church, why does its official emblem look like a line‑drawing photocopy of a […]
THE PROMISE THAT CANNOT KEEP ITS WORD: Are “Revelations” Still Being Revealed in Modern Mormonism?
A Theological and Historical Examination from a Traditional Christian Perspective ✦ ✦ ✦ INTRODUCTION There may be no claim more central to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints than the claim that the heavens, sealed shut for nearly two millennia after the death of the apostle John, were […]
A Faithful Black Saint, an Unprecedented Temple Ordinance, and the Unhealed Wound of Mormonism’s Racial Theology
The 1894 “Servitor” Sealing of Jane Manning James: A Theological and Historical Examination ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Question Echoing Across the Centuries On a December day in 1884, an aging Black widow in Salt Lake City dictated a letter to the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day […]
The Seal That Never Was: Why Isaiah 29 Does Not Foretell the Book of Mormon
Joseph Smith’s Golden Plates, and the Anatomy of a Repackaged Prophecy ❦ ❦ ❦ A Critical Theological Examination INTRODUCTION: A PROPHECY IN SEARCH OF A FULFILLMENT In the centuries since the Latter-day Saint movement first appropriated the twenty-ninth chapter of Isaiah as a foretelling of […]
An Island Among Continents: Why the Latter-day Saint Movement Remains Largely Unaccepted by the World’s Religious Traditions
The Doctrinal Architecture That Keeps the LDS Church Alone Introduction: A Quiet Standoff in the World’s Religious Landscape Few religious phenomena of the modern era are as instructive — or as misunderstood — as the relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the […]
Conjured into Existence: Joseph Smith’s 1842 Temple Ordinances
Image: A digitally enhanced photo by this author of the Gilbert, Arizona LDS Temple. A Historical and Theological Examination of the Most Sacred Mormon Rituals ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Cathedral Built in Seven Weeks On the second floor of a modest mercantile building in Nauvoo, Illinois, on the warm […]
THE MORMON GODS OF MANY WORLDS: The Unresolved Contradiction at the Heart of Latter-day Saint Exaltation
A Theological Examination of Eternal Progression, Premortal Life, and the Eternal Presence of Heavenly Father I. Two Promises, One Soul: The Knot at the Center A faithful Latter-day Saint who has knelt at a sealing altar in a temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been given […]
Summary and Analysis: The Book of Mormon Verified (A. B. Phillips, 1912)
Bibliographic Context The pamphlet, No. 231 in the Herald Publishing House series (Lamoni, Iowa — then the RLDS headquarters), was written by Elder A. B. Phillips and printed in 1912. Phillips’s central thesis is that forty “eminent archaeologists and authors” had, by the early […]
The Latest on the Mindanao Earthquake.
A powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck offshore Sarangani province in Mindanao, Philippines, on Monday, June 8, 2026, at 7:37 AM Philippine Standard Time (PST). The epicenter was located approximately 32 km west of Maasim, Sarangani (or roughly 8–26 km southwest/west-southwest of General Santos […]
Joey Sampaga: The Narrow Door, Luke 13:22-30
Delivered by Pastor Joey | East Valley International Church | Gilbert, Arizona Text: Luke 13:22-30 (ESV) Summary of Expository Sermon: Luke 13:22–30 Strive to Enter the Narrow Door Opening Review and the Growth of the Kingdom Pastor Joey begins with a review of the prior week’s text (Luke […]