Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
How a church lawyer’s friendly podcast interview — and a marketplace crowded with the word “Mormon” — are complicating the LDS Church’s trademark case against John Dehlin ❦ ❦ ❦ On a friendly stage, before a friendly host, a lawyer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tried to explain the difference between…
A Scholarly Look at Kolob, Embodiment, and the Latter-day Saint Universe — ✦ ✦ ✦ — Introduction: A Promise About the Moon In March 1892, readers of the Young Woman’s Journal, a magazine for Latter-day Saint young women in Utah, turned to a Sunday reading unlike any other in the issue. Oliver B. Huntington, an aging veteran of the…
A Traditional Christian Examination ❧ ✦ ❧ Introduction: A Microphone Lowered for a Four-Year-Old On the first Sunday of almost any month, in almost any of the thousands of Latter-day Saint meetinghouses that dot the American West, a familiar scene unfolds. The bishop invites the congregation to share testimonies. After a pause, a small figure…
The Answer Before the Question Moroni 10:4–5, the Architecture of Spiritual Certainty, and Why a Christian Should Not Take the Test ❦ ❦ ❦ I. Introduction: The Doorstep and the Question Two young men in white shirts and dark ties stand on a porch in Mesa, Arizona. They are nineteen, perhaps twenty. They have been…
An Essay in Historical and Literary Criticism I. The Room With No Curtain There was no curtain. That single fact, so easily lost in two centuries of argument, is where any serious inquiry into the Book of Mormon must begin. In the spring of 1829, in a farmhouse in Fayette, New York, a twenty-three-year-old man…
Claude AI summary of Mormon Stories podcast “How the Book of Mormon was Composed” Ep. 1615 Source Program: Mormon Stories Podcast, Episode 1615 — “How the Book of Mormon was Composed,” installment ten of the LDS Discussions series. Participants: John Dehlin (host); Mike of LDS Discussions (guest); Douglas Stilgoe, known online as “Nemo the Mormon”…
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 Harvard Law School,…
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 Saints. She had walked…
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 two promises that, on…
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 twentieth century, unwittingly confirmed the Book of Mormon’s narrative of ancient…