Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
The Shelf: When Faith Meets Unanswered Questions For many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), faith is a carefully constructed edifice. Beliefs are meticulously placed upon a mental shelf, each one bolstering the others. But what happens when troubling questions begin to accumulate, threatening the stability of the entire…
Illustration: Faith meets the fossil record. This Google Gemini AI illustration captures the introduction to the blog post, highlighting the irony of a modern religious monument standing beside a scientifically verifiable prehistoric excavation site. A Scholarly Examination of Book of Mormon Archaeology in Light of Current Evidence “Biblical archaeologists can barely keep pace with the…
Photo: From the diary of James Strang (see attached PDF). Via Archive.org. Publisher: Michigan State University Press. Copyright review: Public domain according to HathiTrust rights database. The Mormon King Nobody Remembers: James Jesse Strang and His Island Empire of Fraud The Blood of a Prophet and the Ambitions of a Pretender In the spring of…
ChatGPT image: That awkward moment for Joseph Smith when the 116 pages of the lost manuscript come back annotated in red ink from Heaven’s Editorial Department. Seven Doctrinal Fault Lines That Separate Mormon Theology from Historic Christian Faith Are Mormons Christians? Let us be honest from the first sentence: Mormonism is not Christianity. It is…
Photo: A remarkable photo-realistic visualization of history, generated by Google Gemini. This detailed image vividly captures the introduction to the essay: a stout and earnest farmer, Martin Harris (left), having braved the bitter winter, presents mysterious ancient characters on a slip of paper to the esteemed classical scholar Professor Charles Anthon (right) at Columbia College…
Photo: Behold the ultimate heavenly realm. With its gleaming white spires, peaceful waters, and crowds ascending in white gowns. This is Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro, imagining what The “Celestial Kingdom” might look like. THREE KINGDOMS, ONE QUESTION: What Does the Bible Teach About Heaven? A Scholarly Analysis of Latter-day Saint Afterlife Doctrine Introduction: A…
Photo: In February 1828, Martin Harris arrived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, to assist the Prophet. By June, the Prophet had translated 116 pages with Martin Harris as his scribe. Martin asked for Joseph’s permission to return to New York and show the manuscript pages to his wife, but the Lord forbade it. Because of Martin’s continual…
Photo: Joseph Smith, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump walk into Mar-a-Lago. The hostess quietly asks, ‘So… is this a business meeting, a sealing, or a plea bargain?’ “The besetting sin of religious thought is not doubt but credulity — the willingness to believe what we wish were true rather than what the evidence compels us…
Photo: Google Gemini imagines Joseph Smith in a modern setting, “translating” a copy of the King James version of the Bible on the office copy machine. Questions of religious truth are ultimately matters of faith as well as evidence. But faith that is unwilling to examine evidence is not strengthened faith but rather faith that…
A Scholarly Examination from Inquisitive and Historical Perspectives Introduction to the Golden Plates and Their Significance The golden plates represent the foundational artifact claim of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), serving as the purported ancient record from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon between 1827 and 1829. According…