I spent most of 2021 writing a series of posts to follow along with the \u201cCome, Follow Me\u201d curriculum for the Doctrine and Covenants.\u00a0 I had a few reasons for doing this.\u00a0 First and foremost, I wanted to challenge myself to look more closely at the scriptures, to really read and think about what the Doctrine and Covenants says and the context in which it says it to deepen my personal understanding.\u00a0 Studying the Joseph Smith Papers resources around the earliest versions of the revelations and then writing about an idea or thought that caught my attention is an approach that helped me do that.\u00a0 Second, there were several ideas that run through the Doctrine and Covenants that I\u2019ve been musing on for years and wanted to take the time and effort to really collect and organize my thoughts on those topics, such as the endowment of power and the development of temple ritual. \u00a0Third, I noticed that there was a surprising dearth of literature about the Doctrine and Covenants compared to the other sections of scriptures (that\u2019s not to say that there isn\u2019t literature about it out there, just not nearly as much available as the Bible or the Book of Mormon), so, for better or worse, I wanted to offer my own contribution to that literature in a format that was freely available and which drew on the scholarly analyses that I have read. The results varied from musing on interpretation based on context, examining the ideas portrayed in the sections and how they have evolved in the Church since the time the revelations were recorded, stories from Church history that were related to the revelations or the things they taught, thinking through some of my own concerns and anxieties, etc.<\/p>\n
To the third reason I gave for writing this series, now that the posts are all up, I wanted to gather them together into one place.\u00a0 This post will serve as an index of the posts, with a few other posts I\u2019ve put up over the years on relevant topics added in for good measure.\u00a0 That index is given below for anyone who decides they are interested in reading those posts in the future.\u00a0 Enjoy! (Or don\u2019t, whatever is your cup of tea<\/span> Word-of-Wisdom-approved beverage.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n