Equipping Saints • Engaging Culture • Examining Claims
Nice try, but no cigar (and its popular variation, “close, but no cigar”) is an American idiom that originated in early 20th-century carnivals. Fairground barkers handed out real cigars as prizes for winning games of skill. If a participant failed to win, the barker would declare they were close but missed out on the prize….
God Doesn’t Speak Jacobean: A Linguistic and Theological Examination of an 1830s American Scripture — ✦ — Introduction: A Strange Echo from Upstate New York In the spring of 1830, in the burned-over district of western New York, a young man not yet twenty-five stood at the head of a newly organized church and began…
An essay in Christian apologetics: A Traditional Christian Response to a Mormon Missionary Tract ❖ ❖ ❖ Introduction: A List That Has Outlived Its Origin Few Latter-day Saint apologetic instruments have enjoyed the quiet longevity of the so-called ‘17 Points of the True Church.’ For more than half a century, the list has circulated on…
Faithful as the Sun: The Brother in the Shadow ✦ ❖ ✦ I. A Horseman in the Illinois Heat The afternoon of June 27, 1844, sat heavy over western Illinois. Heat pressed down on the prairies, and in the dust of the road a wagon rattled westward, its young driver — a fourteen-year-old boy —…
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Drawing Lines Around the Truth: How Latter-day Saint Apologetic Method Predetermines Its Conclusions on Early Christian History and the Great Apostasy ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: A Compass Set Before the Pencil Among the rarer pleasures of a long career spent reading apologetic literature is the discovery of an argument that cannot lose. Not an argument…
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…
Ninth post in the Early Mormon Personalities Series The Watchman on Olivet Orson Hyde — Apostle, Wanderer, and the Long Shadow of an Affidavit 1805 ~ 1878 I. Before Sunrise on the Mount of Olives Before the first light touched the limestone walls of the Old City, a single figure slipped out of Jerusalem through…
Eighth post in the Early Mormon Personalities Series Orson Pratt and the Logical Architecture of Early Mormonism 1811 ~ 1881 I. A Man on a Bridge at Midnight In late August of 1842, on a sticky Illinois night thick with the smell of river mud and prairie smoke, a slender man of thirty walked alone…
Seventh in the Early Mormon Personalities Series 1,500 Miles to a Mistaken Identity: Peter Whitmer, Jr.’s Mission to a People Who Were Never There 1809 – 1836 ❦ ❦ ❦ I. Prologue: A Cabin, a Cow, and the Birth of an American Religion On a humid June evening in 1829, in a log cabin tucked…