Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
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.” —…
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:…
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…
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…
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,…
Why the Entire Mormon Restoration Stands or Falls on One Man, Joseph Smith ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: The Hinge on Which Everything Else Turns There is a particular kind of theological conversation that, no matter where it begins, ends up in the same place. It may begin with the Book of Mormon. It may begin…
A scholarly examination of the Book of Mormon’s textual and literary fingerprints ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Book Worth Examining Honestly On the title page of every modern copy of the Book of Mormon, readers encounter a remarkable claim: that the volume in their hands is an authentic ancient record, translated by the gift and…
A Traditional Christian Examination of Latter-day Saint Proxy Baptism ✦ ⬩ ✦ Introduction: A Woman in the River On a September day in 1840, a widow named Jane Neyman waded into the muddy current of the Mississippi River near the half-built city of Nauvoo, Illinois. She was not being baptized for herself. She had come…
EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — TWENTIETH INSTALLMENT Helen Mar Kimball, the Doll, the Altar, and the Making of a Mormon Memory ❖ ❖ ❖ On a warm afternoon in Nauvoo, Illinois, sometime in 1841, a twelve-year-old girl named Helen Mar Kimball still loved her dolls. She kept a small company of china dolls, gifts her father,…
EARLY MORMON PERSONALITIES — FOURTEENTH INSTALLMENT He Proved a Prophet Wrong with the Prophet’s Own Bible. ❦ ❧ ❦ On the warm evening of June 10, 1844, a column of nearly one hundred men marched through the streets of Nauvoo, Illinois, toward a modest brick print shop. They carried a sledgehammer. Inside stood a single…