Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
How a church lawyer’s friendly podcast interview — and a marketplace crowded with the word “Mormon” — are complicating the LDS Church’s trademark case against John Dehlin ❦ ❦ ❦ On a friendly stage, before a friendly host, a lawyer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tried to explain the difference between…
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…
A Traditional Christian Examination ❧ ✦ ❧ Introduction: A Microphone Lowered for a Four-Year-Old On the first Sunday of almost any month, in almost any of the thousands of Latter-day Saint meetinghouses that dot the American West, a familiar scene unfolds. The bishop invites the congregation to share testimonies. After a pause, a small figure…
Image: A profound AI revision of the original image displayed in the Salt Lake Tribune: “Even carved in immutable white marble, a moment of divine second-guessing over the current lineup is unmistakably etched into the Savior’s posture.” Called by Whom? The Latter-day Saint Apostleship Measured Against the Twelve Christ Chose ❦ ❖ ❦ I. Introduction:…
The Answer Before the Question Moroni 10:4–5, the Architecture of Spiritual Certainty, and Why a Christian Should Not Take the Test ❦ ❦ ❦ I. Introduction: The Doorstep and the Question Two young men in white shirts and dark ties stand on a porch in Mesa, Arizona. They are nineteen, perhaps twenty. They have been…
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…
Image: An AI-generated image imagines a group of handsomely dressed lawyers frantically digging a hole near an LDS temple to find archeological evidence against brand infringement. Friends of John Dehlin Want to Know. Furthermore, Was The Lawsuit Obtained By Revelation? Twenty Years of Silence, the Manufacture of “Confusion,” and the LDS Church’s Case Against Mormon…
Photo: This image shows Jacob Hansen channeling his inner Justin Martyr, minus that whole beheading by the Roman prefect Rusticus. Hansen is a Latter-day Saint businessman, father of four, seminary teacher, youth-football coach, surfer, hunter, sailor, Jiu-Jitsu enthusiast, and operator of Thoughtful Faith—a channel apparently founded on the premise that a sufficiently busy man can…
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…
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.” —…