Doctrine and Covenants

Week 30: Joseph Smith’s vision of the celestial kingdom; Joseph F. Smith’s vision of the spirit world

D&C 137–138

15 June 2017

• Joseph Smith, Journal, 21 January 1836 (pp. 136–37); recorded by Warren Parrish. Read the original entry in Joseph’s journal that was canonized in 1976 and became Doctrine and Covenants Section 137 in 1981.
• Joseph F. Smith, “Status of Children in the Resurrection,” Improvement Era 21, no. 7 (May 1918): 567–74. In this address given in the Salt Lake Temple (given only eight months before his vision in D&C 138), President Smith taught about the status of the spirits of children who die and how they will be resurrected.
• George S. Tate, “‘The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead’: Death, the Great War, and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic as Context for Doctrine and Covenants 138,” BYU Studies 46, no. 1 (2007): 4–40. Tate gives the historical background and context in which Joseph F. Smith received his vision of the redemption of the dead.
• Mary Jane Woodger, “From Obscurity to Scripture: Joseph F. Smith’s Vision of the Redemption of the Dead,” in You Shall Have My Word: Exploring the Text of the Doctrine and Covenants, ed. Scott C. Esplin, Richard O. Cowan, and Rachel Cope (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center and Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012), 234–54.