Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
Calling, Election, and Carte Blanche: The Crowning Ordinance Most Mormons Have Never Heard Of I. The Room Behind the Curtain Picture a Sunday evening inside a granite temple, the kind that crowns a hill or anchors a city square. The doors are locked. The visitors’ rooms are empty. The chapels are dark. Somewhere within, in…
How the Book of Mormon Could Have Been Written Without Plates, Without Angels, and Without Divine Intervention A Literary, Historical, and Archaeological Examination ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Question of Authorship On a March evening in 1830, the press of Egbert B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, finished setting type on a 588-page volume bound…
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…
Photo: Behold the ultimate heavenly realm. With its gleaming white spires, peaceful waters, and crowds ascending in white gowns. This is Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro, imagining what The “Celestial Kingdom” might look like. THREE KINGDOMS, ONE QUESTION: What Does the Bible Teach About Heaven? A Scholarly Analysis of Latter-day Saint Afterlife Doctrine Introduction What…
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…