Resource Review · Latter-day Saint Websites
BYU Religious Studies Center
The faithful scholarship publishing arm of Brigham Young University, with hundreds of full books online for free — the quietest enormous library in Latter-day Saint study.
- Editor rating
- 4.5 / 5
- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web
- Developer
- Brigham Young University
- Launched
- 1975
The verdict
The Religious Studies Center at BYU publishes peer-reviewed Latter-day Saint scholarship on scripture, history, and doctrine, and quietly puts most of it online for free. If you want serious LDS academic writing without paying for a single book, this is where it lives.
Try BYU Religious Studies Center ↗Opens rsc.byu.edu
The BYU Religious Studies Center has quietly become the largest free library of peer-reviewed Latter-day Saint scholarship on the open web. Founded in 1975 as the research and publishing arm of BYU’s College of Religious Education, the RSC produces academic books, the Religious Educator journal, and the proceedings of the long-running Sperry Symposium and Church History Symposium — and posts the full text of nearly all of it to rsc.byu.edu, free, with no login wall.
It is not a devotional site. It does not run reading plans. It does not push notifications. What it does is host the kind of footnoted, source-cited, chapter-by-chapter Latter-day Saint scholarship that used to require a trip to the BYU bookstore or a Deseret Book special order, and it hosts almost all of it as readable HTML with the print edition’s pagination preserved.
The author list is the working bench of LDS academic religion: Robert L. Millet, Susan Easton Black, Andrew C. Skinner, Kent P. Jackson, Richard Lyman Bushman, Eric D. Huntsman, Camille Fronk Olson, Brent L. Top, and dozens of others. Topics span Old and New Testament commentary, Book of Mormon studies, Doctrine and Covenants and Church history, temple worship, biblical languages, and the history of Latter-day Saint thought. For a reader who wants faithful LDS scholarship at a seminary-press level of rigor without paying a dime, this is the deepest free shelf there is.
✓ The good
- Hundreds of full books online for free — most of the RSC’s monograph catalog reads as complete HTML, with chapter navigation and citations intact
- Peer-reviewed faithful Latter-day Saint scholarship — manuscripts go through editorial and academic review before publication, not self-published essays
- The Religious Educator journal in full — three issues a year since 2000, every article free, searchable by topic and scripture reference
- Conference proceedings archive — Sperry Symposium volumes, Church History Symposium volumes, and other gatherings going back decades
- Strong scriptural coverage — multi-volume series on the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants with chapter-by-chapter treatment
- Authoritative author roster — BYU religion faculty, Church History Department researchers, and visiting LDS scholars from across the academy
- Print editions still available — if you want a physical hardback, almost everything online is also for sale through Deseret Book or the RSC store
✗ Watch out
- Site design is functional, not modern — navigation works but feels like a university press circa 2015, not a polished reading app
- No mobile app (yet) — the site is responsive but there is no dedicated iOS or Android reader
- Search is serviceable but not great — finding a specific essay across hundreds of volumes can take a few tries
- No built-in scripture cross-linking — references are footnotes, not tap-through links to the Gospel Library text
- Audience is intermediate-to-advanced — the prose assumes you already know basic Latter-day Saint vocabulary and scripture
- Citation export is manual — no one-click BibTeX or Zotero handoff, which matters for graduate students
Best for
- Latter-day Saints who want serious scriptural and historical scholarship
- Institute and seminary teachers preparing lessons
- Graduate students and researchers in LDS studies
- Non-LDS readers wanting to understand LDS scholarship in its own voice
Avoid if
- You want a daily devotional or reading plan
- You want a polished mobile reading experience
- You want sermons, podcasts, or video teaching as the primary format
- You want a single-volume reference rather than a sprawling library
What BYU Religious Studies Center is
The Religious Studies Center is the in-house research and publishing arm of BYU’s Religious Education college. It commissions and publishes academic books on the standard works (Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price), Latter-day Saint church history, biblical and Near Eastern languages, temple studies, and the history of LDS thought and practice. It also publishes The Religious Educator, a tri-annual journal aimed especially at institute, seminary, and religion teachers.
Manuscripts are reviewed by an editorial board of BYU religion faculty before they are accepted, and most volumes carry forewords, footnotes, indexes, and bibliographies in the style of a university press. Once published, the full content is posted to rsc.byu.edu as readable HTML, chapter by chapter, with the original print pagination shown in brackets so academic citations remain stable across the print and online editions.
Why Latter-day Saint readers — and serious students of LDS thought — use the RSC
Most Latter-day Saint material on the open web is one of two things: official correlated content from the Church (Gospel Library, General Conference, Come, Follow Me manuals), or unofficial commentary of widely varying quality on YouTube, Substack, and forums. The RSC sits in a third category that is unusually small: peer-reviewed, faithful, academically formatted LDS scholarship, published by the Church’s flagship university and made free online.
That position is what makes it useful. A reader who wants a footnoted treatment of Isaiah 53 in a Latter-day Saint framing, or a careful historical essay on the development of Doctrine and Covenants section 76, or a chapter-length study of women in the Book of Mormon, can find that here in a form that institute teachers and graduate students treat as citable. It does not replace official Church publications and it is not trying to. It is the academic floor underneath them.
The free book library: the RSC’s killer feature
The single biggest reason to know about rsc.byu.edu is the books page — the alphabetical and topical catalog of full-text monographs, edited volumes, and series. Hover the publications menu and you reach a list that runs into the hundreds: chapter-by-chapter treatments of the Old Testament (Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament, Old Testament Cultural Insights), of the New Testament (The Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ multi-volume series, The Apostle Paul: His Life and His Testimony), of the Book of Mormon (the Book of Mormon Symposium series, A Reason for Faith, multiple Isaiah-focused volumes), Doctrine and Covenants (Revelations in Context companion volumes, Joseph Smith and the Doctrinal Restoration), and Latter-day Saint history from Joseph Smith through the twentieth century.
Each book opens to a contents page, then each chapter opens as its own HTML page with footnotes inline and the print page numbers preserved in brackets. There is no paywall, no chapter cap, no "upgrade to read more." You can read an entire 400-page academic volume on the site in the same session, and the same chapter you read online is identical to the printed edition sitting on a BYU religion professor’s shelf. For Latter-day Saint readers used to paying $25 for the hardback at Deseret Book, this is the part of the site that, once you discover it, changes what "having a study library" means.
The Religious Educator: the peer-reviewed journal
The Religious Educator has been published three times a year since 2000 and every issue is online in full. It is aimed primarily at people who teach religion — institute and seminary instructors, BYU religion faculty, Sunday School teachers preparing serious lessons — but the articles are general scholarship: exegesis of specific passages, historical studies of Latter-day Saint doctrine and practice, pedagogy essays on how to teach the standard works, and book reviews of recent LDS academic publishing.
Issues are organized by volume and number, browsable from the journal page, and individual articles have stable URLs that work as citations. Authors include the names you would expect (Millet, Skinner, Black, Jackson, Holzapfel) alongside newer voices and occasional non-LDS contributors writing on shared scriptural and historical ground. For a teacher preparing a Come, Follow Me lesson at the level beyond the manual, the Religious Educator archive is the single best free place to look first.
Conference and symposium archive: decades of LDS scholarship in one place
BYU’s religion college has hosted scholarly gatherings for decades, and the RSC publishes the proceedings as edited volumes that then live free on the site. The Sperry Symposium runs annually and rotates through the standard works — one year on the New Testament, the next on the Book of Mormon, the next on the Doctrine and Covenants. The Church History Symposium is co-hosted with the Church History Department and produces volumes on specific eras and themes (Joseph Smith’s revelations, the Kirtland period, women in early Latter-day Saint history, the global Church). Other gatherings on temples, biblical languages, and interfaith dialogue add still more volumes.
Together these proceedings function as a rolling state-of-the-field for Latter-day Saint scholarship: short, focused chapters by working scholars, edited into thematic volumes, with the full text online. If you want to know what serious LDS academic writing on a given scripture or historical question looked like in 2008, 2014, and 2022, the symposium archive is where you trace it.
Pricing
Online library
Free
Full text of nearly every RSC book, every Religious Educator issue, and the conference proceedings archive, read directly in the browser with no account required.
Print editions
Varies
Hardcover and paperback versions of the same titles, typically $20–$35, sold through Deseret Book, the BYU Store, and the RSC publications page.
Religious Educator print subscription
Around $15/year
Three print issues per year mailed to your home. The same content is free online; the subscription is for readers who prefer paper.
Pricing is the easy section to write: the entire online library is free, with no account, no email gate, and no upsell.
Print editions exist for nearly every title and are sold through Deseret Book, the BYU Store, and the RSC publications page, typically in the $20–$35 range for a hardback or trade paperback. Most readers will not need them — the online edition is the same text — but if you teach from a book repeatedly, the print copy is worth owning.
The Religious Educator journal can be ordered as a print subscription for a small annual fee (around $15 a year, three issues), again as a convenience for readers who prefer paper. The same articles are free online.
There is no premium tier, no "RSC Plus," no logged-in features. The funding model is BYU and tithing-supported, and that is the entire pricing story.
Where BYU Religious Studies Center falls behind
No mobile app. The site is responsive and reads acceptably on a phone, but there is no dedicated iOS or Android reader, no offline download, no sync of where you stopped reading. For an academic library this is fine; for daily devotional use it is a real gap compared with Gospel Library or ScripturePlus.
Search is serviceable but not great. The site search works on titles, authors, and keywords, but finding a specific essay buried in a 600-page symposium volume from 2011 often takes a few tries and a Google site:rsc.byu.edu query as a backup. A modern faceted search would make the library dramatically more discoverable.
No deep cross-linking to scripture. Footnotes cite scripture in the conventional way, but the references are not tap-through links to the actual verses in Gospel Library or on scriptures.churchofjesuschrist.org. For a study session you often end up with two tabs open.
No social or community layer. There are no comments, no highlights you can share, no reading groups. This is by design — it is a publishing arm, not a discussion platform — but readers coming from YouVersion or Hallow will notice the silence.
Citation export is manual. You can copy a bibliographic reference from the book or article page, but there is no one-click BibTeX, RIS, or Zotero handoff. Graduate students and serious researchers end up formatting citations by hand.
BYU RSC vs. Scripture Central vs. Maxwell Institute
These are the three main homes for serious Latter-day Saint scholarship on the open web, and they are genuinely different. Different strengths.
BYU RSC is best at breadth across the standard works and Church history in published-book form. It is the place to read full peer-reviewed monographs and the Religious Educator journal, and its publication program covers Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and LDS history with roughly equal weight. The format is academic publishing: edited volumes, journal articles, conference proceedings, footnotes, indexes.
Scripture Central (scripturecentral.org), formerly Book of Mormon Central, is narrower in focus but deeper on its core subject: the Book of Mormon, with growing coverage of the other standard works through Come, Follow Me resources. Its format is more multimedia — short KnoWhys, podcasts, video, evidence summaries — and aimed at a broader audience than the RSC’s academic-press tone.
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, also at BYU, publishes the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and a smaller but ambitious book program with a more interdisciplinary and humanities-leaning voice. It is closer in feel to a university religious studies department than to a Church publishing arm.
In practice many serious readers use all three. The RSC is where you go for the published book and the Religious Educator article; Scripture Central is where you go for the KnoWhy, the podcast, and the verse-by-verse Book of Mormon focus; the Maxwell Institute is where you go for the longer-form interpretive essay and the JBMS article. None of them replaces the official Church resources at churchofjesuschrist.org and Gospel Library — they sit alongside.
The bottom line
The BYU Religious Studies Center is the largest free library of peer-reviewed Latter-day Saint scholarship anywhere on the web, and most users do not know it exists. If you are a Latter-day Saint who has ever wanted a footnoted, academically formatted treatment of a chapter, a doctrine, or a piece of Church history — or a non-LDS reader who wants to understand serious LDS scholarship in its own voice — rsc.byu.edu is the first place to look. The site design is dated and the mobile experience is plain, but the content is the real thing, and it is free. Bookmark the publications page and the Religious Educator archive.
Alternatives to BYU Religious Studies Center
Scripture Central
The other major free home for faithful Latter-day Saint scholarship online, with deeper Book of Mormon focus, more multimedia, and a broader audience than the RSC’s academic-press tone.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (official site)
The official Church website — General Conference talks, Come, Follow Me manuals, the standard works in dozens of languages, and the authoritative source for current Church teaching.
Gospel Library
The Church’s official scripture and study app, with the standard works, manuals, magazines, and General Conference archive offline on your phone, free and ad-free.
ScripturePlus
Scripture Central’s standard-works app, with KnoWhys, commentary, video, and verse-by-verse helps layered on top of the scriptural text — a strong complement to Gospel Library.
Frequently asked questions
- Is rsc.byu.edu really free?
- Yes. The entire online library — nearly every book the RSC has published, every issue of the Religious Educator since 2000, and the conference proceedings archive — reads as full HTML in the browser with no account, no email signup, and no paywall. Print editions are sold separately, but the digital content is genuinely free.
- Who is behind the Religious Studies Center?
- The RSC is the research and publishing arm of BYU’s College of Religious Education. It was founded in 1975 and is staffed by BYU religion faculty and editorial staff. Manuscripts are reviewed by an editorial board before publication.
- Is the scholarship written from a Latter-day Saint perspective?
- Yes. The RSC publishes faithful Latter-day Saint scholarship — work that engages the standard works (including the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price) and LDS history from within the tradition, while applying academic standards of evidence and footnoting. It is the scholarly counterpart to official Church resources, not a replacement for them.
- How does the RSC compare to Scripture Central?
- They overlap but emphasize different things. The RSC is centered on published books and the Religious Educator journal, with even coverage across the standard works and Church history. Scripture Central is more multimedia, with deeper Book of Mormon focus and short KnoWhy articles, podcasts, and video aimed at a broader audience. Many readers use both.
- Can non-Latter-day Saints use the site?
- Absolutely. The site is open to anyone, and a non-LDS reader who wants to understand how Latter-day Saint scholars read scripture and their own history will find a deep, citable, faithful body of work here. Some prior familiarity with LDS vocabulary helps but is not required.
- What is the Religious Educator?
- The Religious Educator is the RSC’s tri-annual peer-reviewed journal, published since 2000. It carries scriptural exegesis, historical studies, pedagogy essays for religion teachers, and book reviews. Every issue is free online in full.
- Where do I start if I am new to the site?
- Two places. Open the publications page and browse the books by topic — pick a scripture or era you are studying and skim the contents pages until something grabs you. Then open the Religious Educator archive and search for an article on the same topic. Together those two entry points cover most of what makes the site useful.