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…
Category: Mormonism
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…
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…
The Blood of the Witnesses: Why the Apostles’ Sacrifice Refutes the LDS Doctrine of a Total Apostasy
A study in New Testament ecclesiology, patristic history, and the architecture of Latter-day Saint truth claims ❦ ❦ ❦ Introduction: Twelve Men Who Would Not Recant Peter was crucified. Herod Agrippa beheaded James the son of Zebedee, and Luke records it in a single unadorned sentence, as though the Church had already learned to expect…
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…
The Book Already in His Hand: Did Joseph Smith Need a Second Testament?
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…