The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship has released a seven-volume series exploring themes in the Doctrine and Covenants. Each book tackles a specific topic from Latter-day Saint scripture, with contributors like Terryl Givens (Agency), Janiece Johnson (Revelation), and Justin Collings (Justice). Over the coming year, we’ll update this series introduction with exclusive author interviews, offering behind-the-scenes insights into their work.
How the Series Came to Life
Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants traces back to an earlier series. In 2020, the Maxwell Institute published a 12-volume series that provided brief theological introductions to the Book of Mormon. The combination of short books, theological deep dives, and faith-promoting perspectives made the series a hit.
Former director Spencer Fluhman recognized an opportunity when Jeffrey R. Holland challenged the institute to leverage research from the Joseph Smith Papers.
He invited Kate Holbrook (who unexpectedly passed away in 2022) to help him take what readers loved about the Book of Mormon series and do something similar for the Doctrine and Covenants.
Rosalynde Welch and Terryl Givens assumed project ownership when Fluhman’s tenure ended. “We largely continued in the course Spencer and Kate had set, building on the successes of the Book of Mormon series and reaching for its rigorous-yet-accessible magic,” said Welch.
Themes and Authors: A Unique Approach
While the Book of Mormon theological introductions were structured sequentially from 1st Nephi and 2nd Nephi to Ether and the Book of Moroni, the Doctrine and Covenants series takes a thematic approach:
The non-narrative structure of the Doctrine and Covenants called for a topical approach. Authors were invited to select their own topics. I think they ended up with a great mix of both bread-and-butter theological topics like agency (Terryl Givens), revelation (Janiece Johnson), and law (Justin Collings), together with some unexpected and interesting topics like time (Philip Barlow) and seeing (Mason Allred).
As a result of the topical approach, the series is not comprehensive, and some obvious topics, like consecration or atonement, weren’t covered. But we hope this is just the beginning of this kind of work on the D&C, and much more will follow from other authors to fill in those gaps.
Rosalynde Welch, Co-Editor of the Maxwell Institute’s “Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants”
Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants: Scholarship Meets Discipleship
Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants is designed to give readers access to scholarly and devotional insights in each volume.
“It begins with the authors, who bring academic training that allows them to situate the revelations in historical, cultural, and theological contexts,” said Welch. “They also, however, approach their work with personal faith in Christ and commitment to vibrant discipleship.”
Welch referenced Amy Harris’s volume on redeeming the dead to illustrate the dual approach. For example, Harris satisfies scholarly cravings by carefully tracing the development of Malachi’s prophecy throughout scripture, using the rigor expected for academic works. She then examines the topic through a lens of compassion, providing insights such as the ethical implications of using the genealogical records of slaves for temple work.
“The result is a volume that is both rigorous and immediately relevant to readers’ spiritual needs,” Welch explained. “We hope the series demonstrates that serious academic study of scripture can deepen faith, while faith-filled engagement can produce new scholarly insights.”
Maxwell Institute Research Initiatives
Although originated by former director Spencer Fluhman, the Doctrine and Covenants series fits into the Maxwell Institute’s new four-fold research focus:
- Book of Mormon
- Bible
- Interfaith Understanding
- Latter-day Discipleship
“While we don’t focus on Church history per se, the Doctrine and Covenants as scripture and theology fits nicely into our discipleship initiative,” Welch said. “In other words, I think this series still fits very well with the Institute’s current direction.”
Ongoing Conversations with Authors
As part of our Come Follow Me 2025 coverage, we’ll be featuring interviews with Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants authors. In addition to exploring highlights from each book, we also invite participants to explore applications beyond the scope of their books. We’ll update this page throughout the year so you can easily find more information about all seven topics:
- Agency (Terryl Givens)
- Divine Aid (Amy Easton)
- Divine Law (Justin Collings)
- Redeeming the Dead (Amy Harris)
- Revelation (Janiece Johnson)
- Seeing (Mason Allred)
- Time (Philip Barlow)
Quotes From Each Volume
Agency
By Terryl Givens
Latter-day Saints take it as axiomatic that doctrinal convulsions in the early Middle Ages radically reconstituted core Christian doctrines in new ways, often to the detriment of Jesus’s teachings. . . . An enormously pivotal transition occurred from the fourth to the fifth century. In that era, Christianity underwent a radical reinvention. Nowhere are these upheavals and paradigm shifts more immediately manifest than in Christian teachings regarding free will.
Chapter 2: Christian Roots of Agency
Agency is manifest in how we choose to influence others, and in how we choose to be influenced by others. And thus inextricably situated in community, agency carries with it communal responsibilities.
Chapter 4: Agency As Relational
If we look to the Doctrine and Covenants, we do not find doctrinal expositions of atonement. (We find the word once: “I . . . atoned for your sins” 29:1). We find confirmations of His life and suffering death as witnesses of His love.
Chapter 8: The Atonement and Agency
Divine Aid
By Amy Easton
Each of these revelations came because an individual sought to know through Joseph Smith what the Lord would have them do, and in each revelation, the Lord states that the opportunities are contingent on the seeker’s desire.
Chapter 1: The Lord’s Invitation
I have come to prize the Lord’s revelation to Emma as one of these moments when He chose to help a beloved daughter see herself beyond the societal limitations and expectations of her day—to begin to see herself as He sees her.
Chapter 2: The Lord’s Perspective
President Nelson’s explanation of repentance as an invitation to change and become more like Jesus Christ in all aspects of our lives encapsulates well the 129 times that repent and repentance appear in the Doctrine and Covenants. Over and over, we hear the Lord pleading with His people to become individuals who can spend eternity with Him.
Chapter 3: The Lord’s Mercy
We look now at the revelation to and the revelation about James Covel (Doctrine and Covenants 39 and 40) to see how they help us to further understand this aspect of the Lord’s nature and then to think through the more complicated question of what the Lord was trying to teach the Saints through the canonization of these sections.
Chapter 4: The Lord’s Grace
Divine Law
By Justin Collings
My thesis is simple: With Christ as our great Lawgiver, divine law is inseparable from divine love. In Christ’s economy, law is not the antithesis of grace but a medium through which grace abounds. “The commandments and covenants [God] offers you, said President Henry B. Eyring, “are not tests to control you. They are a gift to lift you toward receiving all the gifts of God.”
Prologue: A Tale of Two Prophets
All of us violate God’s laws. Most of us do so daily; some of us almost hourly. That is why, when we reject one of God’s subsidiary laws, willfully or otherwise, we must respond by embracing His primary law of repentance. That is why the scriptures assure us that God “stretches forth his hands unto [us] all the day long.”
Chapter 1: A Book of Commandments
By living God’s laws, we accept His proffered grace, which guides us into and along what President Russell M. Nelson has called “the covenant path.” That is the path illuminated by the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants. It is the path proclaimed by prophets in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 4: The Great Lawgiver
Redeeming the Dead
By Amy Harris
The yearning to maintain ties with loved ones who have died is shared across centuries by people of many faiths. Christians have speculated on and believed in various ways to stay connected with and to provide salvation for the dead.
Chapter 1: From the Foundation of the World
Amazingly, we have been called to participate in a ritual instituted before the world was, a ritual that fully embraces the salvation of all God’s children. In Samuel Brown’s words, “the broad kinship group [is] the actual structure of heaven.”
Chapter 3: In Likeness of the Dead
Section 130’s short statement in 1843 about sociality is echoed in the earlier language describing the Nauvoo House and the Nauvoo Temple in section 124 in 1841. The Nauvoo House was meant to be a house for lodging, recreation, and socializing. Both buildings were referred to as the Lord’s house, and their functions as equally important. The tying together of these two concepts is not accidental. To provide a place of rest for the weary and a place of saving ordinances for the dead are not disparate ideas.
Chapter 4: The Same Sociality
Revelation
By Janiece Johnson
Nearly all of the revelations directed to individuals in the Doctrine and Covenants begin with a plea to hearken.
Chapter 2: Hearkening and Asking
While Joseph confidently moved away from a Protestant conception of sola scriptura, he continued to expand the saints’ sense of scripture itself in the fall of 1831. Speaking to missionaries, the Lord exhorted them to “speak as they are moved upon by the Holy Ghost.” He then shattered any sense of scripture as finite: “whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture” (68:3–4).
Chapter 3: Scripture Abounds
Sometimes, we are hindered in our ability to receive and act upon revelation because we are paralyzed by an ideal that if we are in tune with the Lord, he will micromanage every detail of our decision-making. Not everything matters in the eternal scheme of things. Sometimes, the Lord is telling us to make a choice.
Chapter 7: Cautionary Tales
Seeing
By Mason Allred
We must learn a spiritual literacy that allows us to read text, the earth, and others with sanctified eyes of understanding.
Introduction: Eyes of Understanding
Optically, we can’t serve God and mammon. We can’t pretend to have spiritual vision while looking at others and the world in exploitative or objectifying ways.
Chapter 1: Seeing Heaven, Seeing Earth
Several sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, including 76, 88, 110, and 130, instruct us to train our senses and develop sensory discipleship.
Chapter 2: Hearkening Through the Eyes
Whether you find revelation in sticks, stones, glass, or pages, you must convert surface into depth.
Chapter 3: Revelatory Vision
Time
By Philip Barlow
I’ve recalled that our word “obey” traces its origins not to the secondary idea of compliance to rules, but to attention, to hearing (out of which respect for purposeful rules becomes natural). The deepest call of obedience is not submission to some real or semi-coercive authority, but a yearning awakened by the virtue, the truth, and the beauty in the source of the call, as when we respond to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Milton’s word-painting of the devotion between Adam and Eve before the fall. In their original meanings, the opposite of “obedience” is “absurdity”: The Latin “ab” intensifies “surdus,” which signifies dull, deaf, or mute.
Chapter 1: Radical Sabbath Acoustics
“If ye are not one, ye are not mine” applies vertically across Time, as it does horizontally across space.
Chapter 2: Time Travel with the Dead and Unborn
At one point (at least), the Pharisees asked Him when the kingdom of God would come. “The coming of the kingdom is not something that can be observed,” He replied, “for the kingdom of God is within you.”
Chapter 3: When the Lord Comes
Scripture asserts certain traits of Time, but with few exceptions, it is no more concerned with scientific explanations than are its accounts of creation in Genesis. Sacred texts are motivated, instead, by devotion.
Chapter 4: Time, Agency, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad
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Further Reading
- What Does Patrick Mason Say About D&C 1?
- How Did Early Latter-day Saints React to D&C 76?
- Why Does the Savior’s Church Matter?
- How Has Temple Worship Evolved Since Joseph Smith’s Time?
- What’s in Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations?
- How Did Wilford Woodruff Influence the Development of Temple Doctrine?
Maxwell Institute Author Interviews
Doctrine and Covenants
This section will be updated throughout the year as author interviews are published.
Book of Mormon
- Series Introduction
- 2 Nephi
- Enos, Jarom, and Omni
- Book of Mosiah
- Alma 1–29
- 3rd Nephi and 4th Nephi
- Book of Ether
- Book of Moroni
The Maxwell Institute and the Doctrine and Covenants
- Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants: Series Overview (Maxwell Institute Blog)
- Come Follow Me Resources: Books, Podcasts, and Artwork (Maxwell Institute)
- The Only True and Living Church: Find Truth in Human Complexity (Wayfare Magazine)
- A Review—Agency: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants (Times and Seasons)
- A Review—Redeeming the Dead: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants (Times and Seasons)
