Terryl L. Givens

TERRYL L. GIVENS {[email protected]} is the Jabez A. Bostwick Professor of English at the University of Richmond. He has published in literary theory, British and European Romanticism, Mormon studies, and intellectual history. With Fiona Givens, he has published The Christ Who Heals (Deseret, 2017); The Crucible of Doubt (Deseret 2014), and The God Who Weeps (Deseret, 2012). Current projects include The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Beleaguered Scripture (with Brian Hauglid, Oxford, 2019); Stretching the Heavens: Eugene England, Mormonism, and the Dilemmas of Discipleship (UNC Press, 2020); and What Everyone Needs to Know About Mormonism (Oxford, 2020).

Articles

Heretics in Truth: Love, Faith, and Hope as the Foundation for Theology, Community, and Destiny

I want to begin with a passage of startling—and unsettling—insight, from John Stuart Mill:

There is a class of persons . . . who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion. . . . This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.

Protocols of the (Other) Elders of Zion | Andrew F. Smith, ed., The History of the Saints, 3d edition, by John C. Bennett

One may impute two possible rationales to the decision by the University of Illinois Press to reprint an 1842 expose of Joseph Smith and Mor monism. Its re-publication may represent an appreciation for its value…

The Book of Mormon and Religious Epistemology

In his important study of Language, Belief, and Experience, the ethnographer Rodney Needham tells of a dream which disturbed his sleep one night. He found himself among a people he had once studied, the Penan of Borneo, struggling to converse with them in their native tongue. He was distressed to realize he could not translate one particular phrase: “I believe in God.”

Dialogue Book Report #12: Terryl L. Givens on Eugene England

Dr. Terryl L. Givens joins us to talk about his newest book, Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism. Eugene England was one of the primary founders of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 1966, an… Read more

Dialogue Fireside #6 w/Terryl Givens

A New York native, Terryl Givens did his graduate work in intellectual history (Cornell) and comparative literature (UNC Chapel Hill). In 2019 he retired from the Jabez A. Bostwick Chair at the University of Richmond… Read more

Dialogue Lectures #6 w/ Fiona and Terryl Givens

In this podcast, Terryl and Fiona discuss some of the ways in which we construct our faith identity, and how we might rethink the interconnections of Mormonism as an institution, a community, a belief structure,… Read more