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.
CSpence
/ January 14, 2013I am curious to know why we are still wasting our time with the pseudo encyclopaedias. Wikis are the not the future of encyclopaedia but they are already our present. The FAIR wiki is growing but would be greatly helped if the authors of these types of book would stop wasting their time with books like this one.
William Hamblin
/ January 14, 2013There are a number of reasons why, having to do with the publishing industry, how scholars get promoted, etc. The fundamental problem with the Wiki system is lack of professional scholarly editing and peer review.
CSpence
/ January 14, 2013The problem of peer review and editing is an easy problem to rectify within the Mormon scholar community. There are thousands of Wikipedia articles that are commissioned by professionals and once posted are reviewed by other professionals. However you have noted in your review that even a thorough peer review (assuming this book had one) is not enough to assure the most recent scholarly advances are utilised.
The issue of scholarly recognition is simply an ego problem, ie “I am only going to provide my scholarly input if I can have my name printed on a fat book in fancy lettering.” Again I posit that is a thing of the past (hopefully).
William Hamblin
/ January 14, 2013Professors don’t get tenure and promotion without peer reviewed publications. Contributions to wikis are not considered publications because they are not peer reviewed. It doesn’t have to do with the “ego” or arrogance of scholars as you claim. It has to do with the nature of the system by which they are evaluated. This is simply the way universities work. Why would you expect a professor to want to work on a wiki system when he would end up losing his job for failure to publish?
Vader
/ January 17, 2013I personally loathe Wikis.
I defy anyone to read some of the articles, and associated talk pages, on just about any controversial subject at Wikipedia and keep his breakfast down.
rameumptom
/ January 17, 2013What a shame that several of the articles did not have any bibliography (why seek tenure without a good bibliography?) or recent articles. Shouldn’t we allow Elder McConkie and Pres JFSmith rest in piece already? We already had one extremely embarrassing event last year from a BYU religion professor regarding the curse. Do we need to keep perpetuating old ideas, simply because those who desire tenure cannot be bothered with updating their personal libraries?
William Hamblin
/ January 17, 2013McConkie and J F Smith are certainly worth including. The issue is, they shouldn’t leave out modern studies.