The Weight of the Past: Presentism, History, and the Danger of Judging The Dead by the Standards of the Living A Historical and Cultural Analysis There is an old Latin legal phrase—nunc pro tunc—that translates roughly as “now for then.” In courtrooms, it describes the retroactive application of a ruling. In the study of history,…
Category: History
Folding Away the Shroud of Turin into the Archive of Pious Imagination
Photo: Secondo Pia’s 1898 negative of the image on the Shroud of Turin has an appearance suggesting a positive image. It is used as part of the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. Image from Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne. Via Wikimedia. U.S. work that is in the public domain. Why the Shroud of Turin…
The Wadi al-Jarf Papyri: Ancient Egypt’s Eyewitness Account of the Building of the Great Pyramid
Photo: Papyrus containing the diary of Merer at the Wadi al-Jarf exhibition, Cairo Museum, 2016. The Discovery, Translation, and Significance of the World’s Oldest Written Papyri A Find Without Precedent In the annals of Egyptian archaeology, certain discoveries arrive with the force of revelation — moments when the ancient world suddenly speaks in a recognizable…
Mark Hofmann and the Mormon Murders
Unraveling the Dark Saga of a Master Forger Who Deceived a Church and Murdered to Protect His Lies Introduction: A Church Deceived On the morning of October 15, 1985, Salt Lake City awoke to what promised to be a crisp, beautiful autumn day. Temperatures were expected to reach a pleasant 62 degrees under cerulean skies….
The Wife Who Stayed: Emma Smith and the Fracturing of Mormonism
A Historical and Theological Examination I. The Exodus Begins The winter of 1846 descended upon Nauvoo, Illinois, with a bitter cold that matched the chill settling over what had once been the largest city in the state. Along the frozen streets that led to the Mississippi River, wagons creaked under the weight of household goods,…
A Scholarly Rebuttal to Metropolitan State University’s Rejection of Standard American English
The recent controversy surrounding the Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Writing Center guidance represents a troubling moment in American higher education—one that conflates genuine linguistic scholarship with ideologically driven pedagogy, ultimately harming the very students it purports to help. The serious intellectual and practical errors embedded in MSU Denver’s now-retracted materials should be addressed. Legal…
Are We Stumbling Toward Another Dark Age? Historical Parallels Suggest Decline in Western Civilization
The cyclical nature of civilizational decline has become a subject of renewed scholarly concern as contemporary Western societies exhibit troubling similarities to historical periods of collapse. Throughout history, Western civilization has experienced two profound disruptions that plunged entire regions into extended periods of cultural, technological, and political regression. The question confronting political scientists and historians…
What Was the Protestant Reformation All About?
What Was the Reformation All About? Introduction “We are beggars. This is true.” These were the final words penned by Martin Luther on February 18, 1546, as he lay dying in his hometown of Eisleben. In that simple confession lies the heart of the Protestant Reformation—a movement that would shatter the unity of Western Christendom…
The Two Swords of Christ: Five Centuries of War between Islam and the Warrior Monks of Christendom
The Two Swords of Christ: Five Centuries of War between Islam and the Warrior Monks of Christendom by Raymond Ibrahim Summary – Main Argument The book chronicles the conflict between Islam and the West through the history of the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller, warrior-monk orders that Ibrahim presents as defenders of Christian civilization against…
The Machine That Broke Mark Twain: A Cautionary Tale of Innovation and Ruin
In the grand pantheon of American literary figures, few cast as long a shadow as Samuel Langhorne Clemens—the man the world knew as Mark Twain. Author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain was more than America’s greatest humorist; he was a cultural institution, a voice that defined a nation…




