Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
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…
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….
God Doesn’t Speak Jacobean: A Linguistic and Theological Examination of an 1830s American Scripture — ✦ — Introduction: A Strange Echo from Upstate New York In the spring of 1830, in the burned-over district of western New York, a young man not yet twenty-five stood at the head of a newly organized church and began…
Faithful as the Sun: The Brother in the Shadow ✦ ❖ ✦ I. A Horseman in the Illinois Heat The afternoon of June 27, 1844, sat heavy over western Illinois. Heat pressed down on the prairies, and in the dust of the road a wagon rattled westward, its young driver — a fourteen-year-old boy —…
Calling, Election, and Carte Blanche: The Crowning Ordinance Most Mormons Have Never Heard Of I. The Room Behind the Curtain Picture a Sunday evening inside a granite temple, the kind that crowns a hill or anchors a city square. The doors are locked. The visitors’ rooms are empty. The chapels are dark. Somewhere within, in…
Ninth post in the Early Mormon Personalities Series The Watchman on Olivet Orson Hyde — Apostle, Wanderer, and the Long Shadow of an Affidavit 1805 ~ 1878 I. Before Sunrise on the Mount of Olives Before the first light touched the limestone walls of the Old City, a single figure slipped out of Jerusalem through…
Eighth post in the Early Mormon Personalities Series Orson Pratt and the Logical Architecture of Early Mormonism 1811 ~ 1881 I. A Man on a Bridge at Midnight In late August of 1842, on a sticky Illinois night thick with the smell of river mud and prairie smoke, a slender man of thirty walked alone…
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…