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John Corrill followed Joseph Smith for six years. This was his conclusion.

  John Corrill’s 1839 history is easy to quote as an anti-Mormon source. That misses what makes it useful. Corrill did not spend the early years of Joseph Smith’s movement standing outside it. He joined after trying to disprove it, defended the Saints against accusations he thought were false, served in church leadership, and eventually decided that the movement was a false religion. [1] [2] What changed his mind was a pattern which he had watched develop from the inside: failed plans, financial collapse, pressure against dissenters, escalating militancy, and promises of divine protection that always ended in disaster. [1] That makes Corrill’s story more useful than a simple hostile exposé. It records both why an intelligent early convert believed and why he later stopped believing. The complete 1839 text is available in the Lucifer’s Lantern Full Text Library, including Corrill’s own account of his conversion, church service, the Missouri conflict, and his final remarks to the S...
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No. The Mormon Church is Not Suddenly Opposed to Gambling

Almost immediately after President D. Todd Christofferson said, “Gambling is morally wrong,” during the October 2026 General Conference, the LDS apologetic account @allthoseinfavor reacted as though the Church had just drawn a new moral line on gambling. Which personally is a bit concerning, seeing as the account runs a podcast discussing all aspects of Mormonism, including the history of the church. So I find it hard to believe that they haven't ever encountered the anti-gambling position of the church in their studies. Christofferson’s talk was certainly timely. He described a world in which smartphones have made sports betting, casino-style games, and prediction markets available almost anywhere, and he warned against treating an occasional wager as harmless entertainment.[1] But the moral judgment itself was not new. In fact, the Church had used almost the same words more than a century earlier. In August 1908, Church President Joseph F. Smith addressed speculation and gambling...
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Mormonism's Complicated History With Caffeine

Ask whether Latter-day Saints can drink caffeine and the current answer is yes. The Church’s own historical summary says caffeine has been “left to the judgment of individual Saints” and is not prohibited as a condition for receiving a temple recommend. [3] That answer is clearer today than it was for much of the twentieth century. Church leaders and publications repeatedly discussed caffeine as a drug, a poison, a potentially habit-forming substance, and at times as the apparent reason coffee and tea were objectionable. Some leaders extended that reasoning directly to cola drinks. In 1965, the First Presidency even told a bishop that decaffeinated coffee did not violate the Word of Wisdom and should not disqualify an otherwise worthy member from a temple recommend.[5] The result was a long period in which formal policy, medical explanation, and everyday Mormon culture did not always point in exactly the same direction. That history helps explain why older and younger Latter-day Saints...
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Visualization of the LDS Canon

Around the 1230s, Hugh of Saint-Cher and a team of Dominican scholars produced the first Bible concordance, working through the Latin Vulgate and recording where its words appeared. Because modern verse numbers did not yet exist, the compilers divided chapters into smaller lettered sections so readers could locate an occurrence. Printing made the method far more useful. John Marbeck published the first complete concordance to the English Bible in 1550 . Alexander Cruden's Complete Concordance followed in 1737 and became one of the best-known English Bible reference works. The basic structure remained familiar for centuries: choose a word, then receive a list of passages where it occurs. Latter-day Saints soon adopted the same approach for their own scriptures. In 1900, George Reynolds published A Complete Concordance to the Book of Mormon in Salt Lake City. The 852-page volume was the product of roughly twenty years of work and classified the words of the Book of Mormon so reade...
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Everything You Need to Know About the Salt Lake Temple

  The Salt Lake Temple will open to the public from April 5 through October 1, 2027, before it is rededicated and again restricted to Latter-day Saints with temple recommends. [2] Reservations opened on September 1, 2026, and one million tour spaces were claimed in less than 24 hours. [1] The Church describes the event as only the second public open house in the temple’s 134-year history. [2] The building visitors will enter is both old and substantially new. [12] [13] Construction began in 1853 and ended with the temple’s dedication in April 1893, but the interior has been altered repeatedly since then. [3] [20] The current renovation adds about 100,000 square feet of underground space, two baptistries instead of one, five instruction rooms, and 22 sealing rooms instead of 13. [12] The temple now rests on 98 base isolators about 20 feet below the structure, part of a seismic system designed to allow substantial horizontal movement during a major earthquake. [14] [24] The chan...
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