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Mormonism...

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Good evening! Good evening, everyone! Good evening, Mr. Real. How are you doing? I am so good radio-free Mormon. Life treating you well? Oh, better than I deserve my friend. You look like you're fresh from the barber shop. Yeah, this is... it's a haircut. I'm not sure if it's a good one or a bad one.

But it is a haircut nonetheless. I hope you didn't leave a tip. How's that Huntsman trial doing? Oh, great! Wonderful news! I expect James Huntsman's attorneys are just waking up about this time after an all-night bender in celebration of that ruling that we covered last night at Mormonism.

Yeah, they probably had a lot of fun celebrating after all of that, huh? Oh, yeah, I did. I got like an hour sleep last night. But I'm here. Do you think that thing has some merit? Do you think we were talking about this earlier? Do you think this has legs under it?

The ruling says it all. So it doesn't make any difference what I think. Two out of three judges say yes, and so it goes forward. And on to the next stage we go. Yes. Well, do you want to tell us anything wonderful, exciting and yours?

Wonderful, exciting in your life, any announcements that you have to make before we introduce the subject of tonight's show?

Just got back, you know, I was here last week of course, but got back in the Grand Canyon and such a beautiful thing and just trying to get back into the swing of things and life is good.

No, we can... maybe we'll put some things in the comments in terms of things we'd love the listeners to click and visit and know where our donation pages, but nothing pressing.

Okay, well, fantastic. Now, as most of you probably know, Dan Vogel, a preeminent historian on things, all things Joseph Smith, and most things Mormonism, wrote a book recently, came out a couple of months ago.

He was doing the circuit. Part of the circuit included our show where he came on to talk about his new book, Charisma Under Pressure, which deals with Joseph Smith from the years 1831 to 1839.

He's already written a previous volume about Joseph Smith before 1831 and he'll be writing and probably is working on it right now.

Another book during the Navu period about Joseph Smith. So it's an amazing thing. It's been very well received. There are a lot of people sitting really nice things about it on the back cover, including one of the Best Biography Award from the Mormon History Association.

So that sounds pretty good. There's a nice blurb from publishers weekly, from BYU Studies, from the Journal of Mormon History. Everybody seems to really, really like this book, except for one person.

And by the way, I have to announce the title of tonight's show because this book, in spite of all of its acclaim, upon its reception, received from one LDS scholar, a two-star book review on Amazon.

And that LDS scholar who gave this book, a two-star book review, was none other than our very own Brian Hales.

And that's why the title of tonight's show is Brian Hales and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book review.

So we're going to go, we're going to go ahead and bring on Brian Hales, ready?

Oh, no.

Yeah, yeah. Get him on here.

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