A Scholarly Look at Kolob, Embodiment, and the Latter-day Saint Universe — ✦ ✦ ✦ — Introduction: A Promise About the Moon In March 1892, readers of the Young Woman’s Journal, a magazine for Latter-day Saint young women in Utah, turned to a Sunday reading unlike any other in the issue. Oliver B. Huntington, an aging veteran of the…
Category: Joseph Smith
The Blood of the Witnesses: Why the Apostles’ Sacrifice Refutes the LDS Doctrine of a Total Apostasy
A study in New Testament ecclesiology, patristic history, and the architecture of Latter-day Saint truth claims ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: Twelve Men Who Would Not Recant Peter was crucified. Herod Agrippa beheaded James the son of Zebedee, and Luke records it in a single unadorned sentence, as though the Church had already learned to expect…
The Book Already in His Hand: Did Joseph Smith Need a Second Testament?
Does the Bible Alone Contain the “Fullness” of the Gospel? A Point-for-Point Examination of the New Testament, Historic Christian Teaching, and the Book of Mormon ◆ ◆ ◆ Introduction: A Farm Boy and a Family Bible Sometime in the spring of 1820, according to the account he dictated years later, a fourteen-year-old boy in Manchester…
The Miracle That Needs Explaining: Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the Burden of Divine Translation
An Essay in Historical and Literary Criticism I. The Room With No Curtain There was no curtain. That single fact, so easily lost in two centuries of argument, is where any serious inquiry into the Book of Mormon must begin. In the spring of 1829, in a farmhouse in Fayette, New York, a twenty-three-year-old man…
HOW THE BOOK OF MORMON WAS COMPOSED: A Summary and Analysis of Mormon Stories Episode 1615
Claude AI summary of Mormon Stories podcast “How the Book of Mormon was Composed” Ep. 1615 Source Program: Mormon Stories Podcast, Episode 1615 — “How the Book of Mormon was Composed,” installment ten of the LDS Discussions series. Participants: John Dehlin (host); Mike of LDS Discussions (guest); Douglas Stilgoe, known online as “Nemo the Mormon”…
The LDS Word of Wisdom: A Revelation Examined from a Traditional Christian Perspective
The Revelation That Wasn’t a Commandment: How a Cup of Coffee Came to Guard the Gates of Mormon Heaven “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” —…
Render Unto Whom? Tithing, Trust, and the $300-Billion Question in Latter-day Saint Stewardship
LDS Vs Traditional Christianity – A study in comparative theology ❦ ❧ ❦ Introduction: A Tenth, a Temple, and a Trillion Dollars Few subjects reveal the distance between traditional Christianity and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as sharply as the doctrine of tithing. On the surface, the two traditions appear to agree:…
THE MORMON GODS OF MANY WORLDS: The Unresolved Contradiction at the Heart of Latter-day Saint Exaltation
A Theological Examination of Eternal Progression, Premortal Life, and the Eternal Presence of Heavenly Father I. Two Promises, One Soul: The Knot at the Center A faithful Latter-day Saint who has knelt at a sealing altar in a temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been given two promises that, on…
Summary and Analysis: The Book of Mormon Verified (A. B. Phillips, 1912)
Bibliographic Context The pamphlet, No. 231 in the Herald Publishing House series (Lamoni, Iowa — then the RLDS headquarters), was written by Elder A. B. Phillips and printed in 1912. Phillips’s central thesis is that forty “eminent archaeologists and authors” had, by the early twentieth century, unwittingly confirmed the Book of Mormon’s narrative of ancient…
Conjured into Existence: Joseph Smith’s 1842 Temple Ordinances
Image: A digitally enhanced photo by this author of the Gilbert, Arizona LDS Temple. A Historical and Theological Examination of the Most Sacred Mormon Rituals ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Cathedral Built in Seven Weeks On the second floor of a modest mercantile building in Nauvoo, Illinois, on the warm morning of May 4, 1842,…








