Doctrine and Covenants Reference Companion

I purchased a copy of D. Largey and L. Dahl (eds.) Doctrine and Covenants Reference Companion, (Deseret, 2012) today; here’s a basic description.

The book is huge and hefty, over 900 pages.  Most of the contributors seem to be drawn from BYU Religious Education and CES.  The book is divided into three sections:

1- main alphabetical entries, 1-710

2- entires on historical background and context for each section, 711-862

3- Appendices with various charts etc.

4- There is an index at the end, but no cumulative bibliography

There seems to have been little use made of the new JSP (citing instead Jessee’s Papers of Joseph Smith), but that’s probably because most articles were written a couple of years ago.  There are numerous references to the D&C and other scriptures within each article.

The entries seem to vary in quality; some are excellent, others lack insight and engagement with current scholarship.  (This is often the case with encyclopedias with hundreds of authors.)  Many of the articles tend to belabor the obvious; the focus is often almost exclusively doctrinal.  There are some nice illustrations and maps interspersed throughout the text.

Many of the articles contain references only to “old-school” LDS sources; One on “premortal existence” cites books Bruce R. McConkie, Joseph Fielding Smith, and James Talmadge, but nothing published in the last 30 years.  (There is, of course  nothing wrong with such sources; but there is no reason to ignore modern scholarship.)  The article on Parley Pratt, on the other hand, does cite Givens and Grow’s new 2011 biography.  Many articles have no bibliography at all.

Overall, its a good reference work, which will be of more use to the average Latter-day Saint rather than the scholar.