Terryl Givens


Terryl Lynn Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Until 2019, he was a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond, where he held the James A. Bostwick Chair in English.
Givens is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a young man, he served a mission in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and later graduated from BYU with a degree in comparative literature. He did graduate work in intellectual history at Cornell and earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina, working with Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English languages and literature. A longtime collaborator with his wife, Fiona Givens, he is the co-author of The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life and Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith.
The New York Times referred to his work as "polemical" and "provocative" while Harper's praised him for being "fair-minded and unbiased."

Personal life

Givens has served in the LDS Church as a bishop in a local congregation.

Publications

Books

Dragon Scales and Willow Leaves. Putnam Juvenile, 1997. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy. Oxford University Press, 1997. By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion. Oxford University Press, 2002. The Latter-day Saint Experience in America. Greenwood Press, 2004. People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. Oxford University Press, 2007. The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009. When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought. Oxford University Press, 2010. Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism. Oxford University Press, 2011. The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life. Ensign Peak, 2012. The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections On the Quest for Faith. Deseret Book, 2014. Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • The Christ Who Heals: How God Restored the Truth that Saves Us. Deseret Book, 2017.
  • The Pearl of Greatest Price. Oxford University Press, 2019.
  • "All Things New": Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between. Faith Matters Publishing, 2020.
  • Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know®. Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism. Chapel Hill: UNC University Press, 2021.

Edited volumes

Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries Oxford University Press, 2008. The Columbia Sourcebook of Mormons in the United States Columbia University Press, 2014.
  • The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism Oxford University Press, 2015.

Articles and papers

Mimesis and the Limits of Semblance. Ph.D. Diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1988