Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — SIXTEENTH INSTALLMENT Cut Not Thy Hair: The Samson of Mormondom and the Cost of Misplaced Faith ❖ ❖ ❖ A Stranger at the Christmas Door On Christmas night in 1843, a gaunt and filthy stranger pushed his way into the Mansion House at Nauvoo, Illinois, where Joseph Smith and his family…
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…
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…
A Scholarly Audit of Christopher Dunn’s “Giza Power Plant” Thesis ❖ ❖ ❖ Introduction: The Pyramid That Powered Nothing The Great Pyramid of Giza has been many things to many people. To Pharaoh Khufu’s funerary architects in the Fourth Dynasty, it was a monument. To Herodotus and Strabo, it was a marvel. To Charles Piazzi…
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 —…
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…