If Truth Were a Child

Essays

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This is an age of polemics. Choices are presented as mutually exclusive and we are given little time to listen. You are either secular or religious. You either believe in the exclusive truth of your own religion or you believe that truth is everywhere, or nowhere. The battle over truth rages on. But what if truth were a child? With how much more care and humility would we speak and act if the truth were not the result of some war of wills, but a flesh-and-bone living child, a living soul? Something that couldn’t be owned or divided up into broken pieces but was instead something we must learn to gather and keep together with love? In these thirteen essays, George B. Handley charitably invites us to put away the false “traditions of the fathers” while seeking to “lay hold of every good thing” wherever it may be found in the world (D&C 93:39; Moroni 7:19). If Truth Were a Child exemplifies how education in the Humanities can enrich our pursuit of truth and increase our faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Handley explores his incremental conversion...as a Christian, as a Latter-day Saint, and as a critic. In each case he traces his responsibilities as a scholar and as a true believer back to sacred personal experiences of charity and grace.

Douglas Christensen Association for Mormon Letters

Handley's ideas will stretch your mind and promote examination of your soul. I recommend this volume to anyone who likes to think critically about things of the soul and the stuff of eternity.

Robert Wheadon LDS Apologist Now

Endorsements

George Handley, one of the Latter-day Saint tradition’s most gifted writers, desires to build a culture worthy of its revealed truths—and this work is a step in that direction. It is a searchingly honest examination of the disciple’s quest, viewed through his own yearnings and failures—and small victories—along the way. A provocative call to the heart and mind alike.

Terryl L. Givens

In our rancorous era of polarization, If Truth Were a Child arrives as a breath of fresh air. George Handley calls us to a better version of ourselves, one characterized by capacious curiosity, serious moral engagement, compassionate critique, and most of all reconciling love. This is a wise and generous book that presents a model of being deeply Latter-day Saint in a pluralistic world, a vision that is both humanely religious and religiously humane.

Patrick Q. Mason

Drawing incisive connections between various aspects of Latter-day Saint life and thought that initially strike his reader as counterintuitive, Handley helpfully illuminates how Latter-day Saints today might live and believe with greater compassion, charity, and insight.

Deidre Nicole Green

About the Author

George B. Handley

George B. Handley is Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. A scholar of literature, religion, and the environment, his publications include New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott and most recently the environmental memoir, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River.

Preface
Why I am a Christian
Why I am a Latter-day Saint
On Criticism, Compassion, and Charity
A Poetics of the Restoration
If Truth Were a Child
Letter to a Remarkable Student
Church Life and the Discipline of Renewal
Waiting on the Lord, or Sustaining Church Leaders
Politics, Religion, and the Pursuit of Community
On the Moral Risks of Reading Scripture
Reading and the Menardian Paradox in 3 Nephi
The Grace of Nothingness

Publication Information

Publication Date: April 2019
ISBN 13: 978-1-9443-9473-8
Page Count: 253
Illustration(s):
Binding: paperback
Price: $ 19.95
Imprint: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship