Review
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Title: Divine Aid (Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants)
Author: Amy Easton
Publisher: BYU Maxwell Institute & Deseret Book
Genre: Religious Non-fiction
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 103
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-8425-0132-3
Price: $12.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Amy Easton’s Divine Aid, a volume in the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series, is a compassionate, personal exploration of its titular theme. The book is insightful and open-hearted, demonstrating the ways that readings oriented towards helping other people can be rigorous.
One of the core strengths of Amy’s book is the way that she weaves small details from her life and in particular her writing process into the prose. While the book is primarily about drawing out the doctrinal principles and teachings from the selected passages of scripture, Amy is sure to give the readers a taste of the work and effort that went on behind-the-scenes, lending weight and authority to her insights. A piece of this is Amy’s comments about reading, studying, and pondering the Doctrine & Covenants itself in search of what theme she wanted to write about. These details add a sense of reality and credence to her claims about the centrality of “divine aid” to the message of the Doctrine & Covenants. Amy illustrates how she organically came to this idea and the ways that this particular reading inspires her too.
The book takes its core theme of “divine aid” and investigates how it manifests across the Doctrine & Covenants. Often this results in Amy highlighting specific sections and passages that may be familiar to readers, but that her focus on divine aid transforms. I loved the way that she is able to draw out ideas and nuances that I had not paid attention to before because she noticed this overarching core theme of divine aid.
The result of Amy’s thorough investigation of this theme is a picture of God’s persistence and kindness in perpetually offering “aid” to all of us. I loved this gentle, open-hearted vision of God, and the implications for how we should relate to God and how God may be striving to relate for us. Amy weaves in small, more devotional, lived religion flourishes to her discussion, helping to illuminate her own response to seeing this core theme in the text.
Those wanting to see evidence of God’s compassionate reaching out in the Doctrine & Covenants would be well served by Amy Easton’s Divine Aid. A thoughtful little book worth your time.