Welcome to 2021 and a year of studying the Doctrine and Covenants together. I’m quite excited to dig into this wonderful book of scripture and explore its history and historical settings, its effects on the Latter-day Saint experience, and its contributions to religion and literature. There is so much to consider and I can’t wait to see what conversations and discussions arise from our readings.

The lesson schedule I’m using with my family and that I’ll be following in future posts is available along with notes and bibliographies at this file, which I’ll be continuously updating as we go along:

D&C Lesson Schedule and Notes

I’ve added a few features since the last iteration of the PDF file: (1) hyperlinks to readings and outside resources are embedded in an arrow icon, just click on them when viewing the PDF on your computer; (2) the further readings include short descriptions that I hope can help you select additional resources to read.

I have also recorded some audio commentary that introduces the lessons and draws from the notes/outlines in the lesson PDF. If you prefer listening to these as a podcast, here is a link that you can follow or paste into your preferred podcast app:

Podcast Feed

Alternatively, you can download the files as MP3s and listen in any audio player:

Now, I understand that the Come, Follow Me curriculum puts D&C 1 first, and in this alternative lesson, I don’t cover the first section because it doesn’t come first chronologically. However, I have a consolation prize to show I mean to support your study even if you’re preference is for the Come, Follow Me sequence: I have the beginnings of a critical text edition of the Doctrine and Covenants and made sure to make D&C 1 ready. You’ll see in this version an apparatus that tracks every textual variation across all the sources and published versions of the revelation—just like critical texts of other books of scripture. I’m quite excited to build something like this for Doctrine and Covenants research. There is still a lot of work to do for the remaining sections, but I can promise my workflows are up to the task and I’ll be making progress thanks to many years of tinkering and testing with formats. I’ll be very interested in your feedback if you have any.

D&C Critical Text Edition (Draft)

So, for this first week, please enjoy some materials discussing studying church history, some of the unique challenges facing us as we do, and Joseph Smith’s first vision.