Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
Image: An AI-generated image depicts a corkboard with pinned illustrations and text snippets detailing the complex legacy of the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon. The pinned images visually contrast the narrative’s themes, showing scenes of warfare, hunting, and nomadic life alongside moments of profound spiritual conversion and a utopian period of peace following the…
The LDS Church announced 385,490 convert baptisms in 2025 — eclipsing the previous record of 330,877 set in 1990 and representing a nearly 25% leap over the 308,682 recorded in 2024. The Salt Lake Tribune. General Conference treated this as a prophetic milestone, and by raw numerical standards, it is. But headline statistics rarely tell…
Image: An AI-generated image imagines Jesus on the Cross in the final moments of His suffering, the two thieves beside Him, a group of mourners below the cross, and several Roman centurians looking up at Jesus. John 19:30 and the Completed Atonement of Jesus Christ A Theological Examination from an Orthodox Christian Perspective ✦ ✦…
Book Review & Summary Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon William L. Davis University of North Carolina Press, 2020 Abstract What if the most controversial book in American religious history was also one of the most extraordinary feats of oral performance ever recorded? In 1829, a…
Sally Chase, Joseph Smith, and the Folk-Magic Roots of Early Mormonism ───────────────────────────── I. Introduction: Two Seekers in Upstate New York The upstate New York frontier of the early 1820s was a place of remarkable religious ferment. Campfire revivals competed with Methodist circuit riders, Baptist immersionists with Presbyterian schoolmen, and woven through all of it—quietly, insistently—was…
Freemasonry, Joseph Smith, and the Hidden Architecture of Mormon Temple Ritual Introduction: A Brotherhood Within a Brotherhood On the night of March 15, 1842, a cold Illinois wind off the Mississippi cut through the streets of Nauvoo, Illinois — the ambitious, half-built city that Joseph Smith Jr. intended to be the crown jewel of his…
A New Textual Analysis of the Book of Mormon An Examination of Dr. John Knight Lundwall’s Groundbreaking Research March 17, 2026 | Mormonish Podcast, Episode E308 Introduction: The Keystone Under the Microscope There is a passage that every reader of the Book of Mormon encounters within the first few seconds of opening the text. It…
The Fabrication Question A Comprehensive Examination of Non-LDS Theories on the Origins of the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price Introduction: The Problem of Provenance Few questions in the history of American religion are more freighted with consequence than this: where did Joseph Smith get his material? The question is not merely…
The Convenient Civilization: Why the Jaredites Fit Joseph Smith’s World, Not 2200 BC’s Introduction: A Battlefield with No Bodies Imagine a battlefield so vast, so saturated with carnage, that nearly two million people are said to have been slain by the sword—and yet not one archaeologist has ever identified a single bone, weapon, or site…
Overview and Purpose Published in 2020 by Deseret Book, 175 Temple Symbols and Their Meanings is a 310-page reference guide by Donald W. Parry, a professor of the Hebrew Bible at Brigham Young University and a contributor to the Dead Sea Scrolls translation project. The book draws on President Russell M. Nelson’s teaching that “each temple is…