Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
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…
TWO TIMELINES: ONE CONTINENT Comparing the Book of Mormon Narrative to the Documented History and Archaeology of the Ancient Americas Introduction: A Story That Asks to Be Believed Civilizations do not pass quietly into the earth. They leave signatures—layered, stubborn, and unmistakable—pressed into stone, clay, metal, and memory. Time erodes their monuments, but it does…
Image: Brigham Young, circa 1855. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. File via Wikipedia. Original image by Charles Roscoe Savage (1832–1909). Public domain. She Ruled Brigham Young: The Quiet Power of Wife No. 51 Harriet Amelia Folsom Young (1838–1910): The Cultured Consort Who Ruled a Prophet’s Heart Introduction: A…
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. From Atheist to Angel Whisperer and His Island Empire of Fraud. The Blood of a Prophet and the Ambitions of a Pretender In the spring of 1844, Nauvoo, Illinois,…