Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
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 Traditional Christian Examination of LDS Missionary Authority ❖ ❖ ❖ Introduction: The Doorstep and the Title Almost every American adult has met them. Two young men in dark trousers, crisp white shirts, conservative ties, and bicycles leaning against the curb. Pinned over their left breast pocket is a black plastic name tag bearing the…
A Comparative Analysis of Method, Authority, and Argument Introduction: The Same Bible, A Different Book When a missionary from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a Reformed evangelical pastor open the King James Bible to the same page, are they reading the same book? On the surface, the answer is plainly yes…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in the middle of the most aggressive temple-building campaign in its nearly 200-year history. Under President Russell M. Nelson, who has personally announced 200 new temples in just seven years, the Church has transformed the American landscape — quietly, expensively, and with almost no financial accountability…
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…
From Babel to Bethlehem—Or to Seattle? A Christian Critique of the Jaredite Ocean Journey I. Introduction: A Voyage in Search of a Map There is a particular pleasure in looking at a map and tracing a story. Children do it with adventure novels; theologians do it with the wanderings of Abraham; armchair travelers do it…
The Quiet Erosion of LDS Sunday School, Home Study, and Tithing ❦ ❦ ❦ I. A Headline the Church Did Not Want to Write On April 16, 2026, The Salt Lake Tribune ran a sentence that, in any prior year of Latter-day Saint history, would have been unthinkable. Independent demographer Matt Martinich, summarizing Church-released data,…
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…
Can a Machine Have a “Moral Compass”? A Mormon Apostle Says Yes — An Orthodox Christian Says Wait ❦ ❧ ❦ Introduction: A Lamb a Day on the Acropolis Elder Gerrit W. Gong opened his Athens address with a parable Henry Kissinger liked to tell. A visitor to a zoo marvels at a lion and…
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,…