Also: Testing the Claim of Missing Plain and Precious Truths ❧ ✦ ❧ Introduction: A Gap of Seventeen Centuries In the spring of 1820, according to his canonized account, a fourteen-year-old farm boy in western New York knelt in a grove of trees and asked which of the churches around him he should join. The…
Category: Latter-day Saints
Another Jesus, Another Spirit, Another Gospel: The Holy Spirit, Religious Counterfeits, and the Latter-day Saint Claim to Christianity
The Frankenstein Gospel: Why Real Fragments Make the Most Convincing Counterfeit Introduction: The Bill That Almost Passes Every cashier in a busy store eventually meets a bill that feels wrong. The paper has the right weight, the familiar texture, the faint red and blue fibers that come from genuine currency stock. The watermark is there…
The Semi-Annual LDS YawnFest: A Lighthearted (and Then Not So Lighthearted) Look at General Conference, Amway, and the Art of Sounding Christian
Why the Church’s twice-yearly broadcast feels so much like an Amway distributor rally and what its polished vocabulary leaves unsaid ❧ ✦ ❧ Introduction: Welcome to the Rally Somewhere in a hotel ballroom in the American Midwest, a man in a well-pressed suit is walking to a lectern. The lights soften. The music swells, then…
The Unlabeled Faith: Glenn Beck, a Quarter-Century of Latter-day Saint Membership, and the Curious Silence of the Public Record
Glenn Beck: A Mormon For All Seasons ❧ ✦ ❧ Introduction: The Most Famous Convert Nobody Mentions In October 1999, a thirty-five-year-old radio personality with a turbulent past stepped into a baptismal font and was immersed by his friend and broadcast partner, Pat Gray. The man was Glenn Beck. Within a decade he would become…
Borrowed Light: C. S. Lewis, the Latter-day Saint Pulpit, and the Difference Between a Quotation and a Doctrine
The Thirteenth Apostle Who Never Was: C. S. Lewis at General Conference Introduction: A Borrowed Voice in the Conference Center This weekend, October 3 and 4, 2026, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints convenes its 196th Semiannual General Conference. Tens of thousands fill the Conference Center on Temple Square, and millions more listen…
Bad Mormon, Good Evidence: The Podcast Interview That Could Sink the LDS Church’s Lawsuit
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…
The Silence Between the Stars: Joseph Smith, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Unsettled Cosmology of the Latter-day Saints
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…
Borrowed Light: Cradle Mormons, Childhood Testimony, and the Cultural Pressures Behind “the Most Religious Americans”
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…
Special Witnesses of What? An Examination of Latter-day Saint Apostolic Authority
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:…
Why I Will Not Pray About the Book of Mormon — And Why That Is Not an Insult
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…