Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
Seventh in the Early Mormon Personalities Series 1,500 Miles to a Mistaken Identity: Peter Whitmer, Jr.’s Mission to a People Who Were Never There 1809 – 1836 ❦ ❦ ❦ I. Prologue: A Cabin, a Cow, and the Birth of an American Religion On a humid June evening in 1829, in a log cabin tucked…
Seventh in the Early Mormon Personalities Series The Faithful Witness: How Hyrum Smith’s Loyalty Carried A Movement and Concealed Its Contradictions ❦ ❦ ❦ I. Carthage, June 27, 1844 — A Cinematic Opening The afternoon was hot and slow on the Illinois prairie. Inside an upstairs room of the Carthage Jail, four men in shirtsleeves…
Fifth Post in the Early Mormon Personalities Series The Man Who Lost a Manuscript and Found a Religion ❦ ❦ ❦ I. A Knock in the Lancashire Twilight It began in the autumn of 1874 with a knock at a quiet Utah farmhouse, an interruption to the Pilkingtons’ evening devotions. The stranger at the door…
Between God and Joseph Smith: The Tragic Arc of Oliver Cowdery Early Mormon Personalities Series — Fourth Post Introduction: A Man Between Two Worlds In the late spring of 1829, somewhere along the green banks of the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, a young schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery knelt beside a young farmer named Joseph…
The Walking Bible Who Lost His Way Sidney Rigdon — Co-Founder, Spokesman, and Cautionary Tale of the Latter-day Saint Movement Early Mormon Personalities Series · Volume Three ❦ ✦ ❦ A Knock on the Door in Mentor Late in the autumn of 1830, on a cold Ohio afternoon when the maples of the Western Reserve…
Introduction If Dr. Seuss taught anything—between the rhymes, the nonsense, and the brightly colored absurdities—it’s that systems obsessed with control, image, and hierarchy eventually tell on themselves. The Sneetches, after all, were so consumed with status markers that they couldn’t see their own ridiculousness. The Lorax stood as a lone, inconvenient voice warning an empire…
T H E R I G H T E O U S C A U S E Early Mormon Personalities · Series Installment One Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism — and the Husband He Could Not Outrun ❖ ❖ ❖ I. The Road Outside Van Buren On the afternoon of May 13,…
A traditional Christian evaluation of LDS disciplinary practice — its origins, its mutations, its modern weaponization, and the New Testament standard it has progressively abandoned. ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Door That Used to Open Both Ways Church discipline is one of those topics that respectable Christians of every century have preferred to discuss in…
How the Book of Mormon Itself Refutes the Distinctive Doctrines of Modern Mormonism A Critical Examination of the “Fullness of the Gospel” Claim From a Traditional Christian Perspective Introduction: A Promise on the Sabbath On a Sunday afternoon in late November of 1841, in the parlor of Brigham Young’s modest home in Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph…
How the Book of Mormon Could Have Been Written Without Plates, Without Angels, and Without Divine Intervention A Literary, Historical, and Archaeological Examination ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Question of Authorship On a March evening in 1830, the press of Egbert B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, finished setting type on a 588-page volume bound…