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About Our Sources: Why We Cite Everything
Why every Counterweight article cites publication, date, and page — how we check a quotation against the archive, and what we do when the record disagrees.
The Counterweight was founded on a simple conviction: the truth can handle scrutiny.
Every factual claim made on this site is backed by verifiable sources. We cite specific publications, dates, and where possible page numbers. We do this not because we are academics (some of us are, some of us aren't) but because the Adventist tradition of rigorous Bible study demands the same rigor when we study our own history.
Where Our Sources Come From
We draw primarily from the Adventist periodical archive — a collection of over 538,000 digitized documents spanning 1850 to the present. This includes publications like The Review and Herald, Spectrum, Adventist Today, The Adventist Review, Ministry magazine, the Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, and dozens of other denominational and independent periodicals.
We also draw from Ellen White's published writings, General Conference session minutes, Adventist seminary dissertations, and other publicly available denominational records.
Why Citations Matter
Selective quotation is the oldest trick in the polemicist's handbook. You can make Ellen White say almost anything if you pull one sentence from a 40-page testimony and ignore everything around it. The only defense against this is to provide the full context — and to invite readers to check for themselves.
Every article on this site includes enough sourcing information that a motivated reader could locate the original document. We encourage you to do exactly that.
What We Don't Do
We do not claim to be objective. Every historian has a perspective, and pretending otherwise is its own form of dishonesty. What we do claim is that our perspective is open to inspection. You can disagree with our conclusions. You cannot disagree with our sources — at least, not without engaging them.
If you believe we have misrepresented a source or omitted relevant context, we want to know. Our corrections policy is simple: we fix mistakes, and we note when we do.
The Editorial Board speaks for The Counterweight as an institution. Individual authors speak for themselves.