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George Handley’s Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River practices theology the way a doctor practices CPR—not as a secondhand theory but as a chest-cracking, lung-inflating, life-saving intervention. The book models what, on my account, good theology ought to do: It is experimental, it is grounded in the details of lived experience, and it takes charity—that pure love of Christ— as the only real justification for its having been written. It is not afraid to guess, it is not afraid to question, it is not afraid to cry repentance, and it is not afraid to speak in its own name.

We could say that Joseph Smith Junior went to the woods for the same reason Henry David Thoreau went: He wished to live deliberately. Or maybe we should say that Thoreau went for the same reasons Joseph Smith did. In 1820, Joseph took to the Sacred Grove to discover “who of all these parties is right, or are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it and how shall I know?” (JS—H 1:10). Thirty years after Joseph went into the grove, Thoreau took to Walden Pond to “front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” Thoreau stayed at Walden for twenty-six months. Joseph Smith stayed in the Sacred Grove for—we might guess—only a few hours at most. But both men came away from their experiences with the “essential facts” they sought.