Author: Chad Nielsen

One of the more controversial aspects of the temple liturgy under Brigham Young was the practice of sealing people to their peers as children, particularly if those peers happened to be high-ranking church leaders. The practice was discontinued by the turn of the twentieth century and is rarely discussed by modern church members today, but…

When we walk the halls of our meetinghouses today, we are greeted by intimate, soft-focus portraits of a smiling Jesus Christ, leading many of us to assume that Latter-day Saints have always embraced such direct depictions of the Savior. However, the visual history of the Church tells a much more complex story, revealing an artistic…

Today, the construction of Latter-day Saint temples is a highly streamlined operation funded by a centralized, global tithing system. But in the 1840s, raising a monumental stone edifice on the edge of the American frontier required an entirely different, grassroots financial engine. A fascinating new interview with Elizabeth Kuehn over at the Latter-day Saint history…

The Deseret Alphabet is often dismissed today as a quirky historical footnote, a strange linguistic experiment championed by Brigham Young that ultimately failed to take root in the Utah desert. However, a closer look at this 19th-century phonetic writing system reveals a complex project driven by practical literacy, social control, and profound spiritual ambition. A…

When examining the tragic estrangement of Emma Smith from the main body of the Latter-day Saints following the martyrdom of her husband, historians and casual readers alike tend to reduce the schism to a dramatic, interpersonal feud with Brigham Young over polygamy and the westward migration. However, the reality of Emma’s post-1844 life was far…

When examining the early settlement of the American West, the history of the Latter-day Saints is often populated with complex figures whose religious zeal blurred the lines between civic duty and frontier vigilantism. Few embody this tension as fully as the Latter-day Saint pioneer John Steele, an Irish-born convert, Mormon Battalion veteran, and pioneer physician…

When we picture the visual history of the early Church, we often envision the sprawling, theatrical scenes of the Mormon Panorama. But who was the man wielding the brush? Carl Christian Anton (C. C. A.) Christensen was more than a mere folk artist; he was a Danish immigrant who abandoned a promising European academic career…

We often visualize the 19th-century Latter-day Saint missionary as a solitary hero braving the world to preach the gospel, but we rarely consider the staggering domestic cost exacted from the wives they left behind. While early Church leaders framed this separation as a holy sacrifice, the lived reality for pioneer women was one of crushing…

We often celebrate the First Amendment as the ultimate shield for religious minorities, assuming that the Founding Fathers’ “godless” Constitution created a neutral public square where all faiths could freely flourish. However, the lived experience of the early Latter-day Saints tells a drastically different story, revealing that the disestablishment of religion actually cleared the way…

Because we believe in human exaltation, Latter-day Saints are usually familiar with Psalm 82:6, where the psalmist declares, “I have said, Ye are gods.” We frequently cite this verse, along with Christ’s quotation of it in John 10, as biblical evidence of our divine potential. However, when we read this text through the lens of…

The King James Version of the Bible has profoundly shaped the Latter-day Saint vocabulary, but its 17th-century translation choices sometimes obscure the rich nuances of ancient Hebrew. One of the most misunderstood words in our scriptural lexicon is ?esed, famously rendered in the KJV as “mercy” or “lovingkindness.” But does this translation capture the true…