Eugene England

Eugene England is the subject of Terryl Givens’s biography Stretching The Heavens, which Kyle read as the story of a Mormon thinker in tension with his own institution — “founder of Mormon studies, Dialogue editor, and disciple-in-exile.” In Kyle’s notes England emerges through several recurring threads: “learning to be righteous in the dark” (the instinct, echoing Discipline Is Destiny, that constant divine contact “moves towards the devil’s plan” rather than the saint’s); the “branch breaking from the tree” framing of sects that separate and lose connection to the broader Christian tradition; and an “ultimate universalism” recovered from Joseph Smith’s King Follett theosis and doctrine of eternal progression.

England held up Joseph Smith as his standard of orthodoxy and antidogmatism, while his conflicts with institutional authority run through the biography’s cast — Boyd K. Packer’s “The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect” and counsel to resign Dialogue, Bruce R. McConkie’s “Seven Deadly Heresies” public censure over God’s progression, and Leonard Arrington, who hired England and judged him blacklisted. He is cross-referenced in The Faith of a Scientist as a parallel LDS voice reconciling intellect and faith alongside Henry Eyring.

Context: Eugene England (1933–2001) was an American writer, literary scholar, and BYU English professor who co-founded Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 1966 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field of Mormon studies. His best-known essay is “Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel.”

Where this appears

• Stretching The Heavens — Terryl Givens’s biography of England; the book’s central subject
• The Faith of a Scientist — cross-referenced as a parallel LDS thinker reconciling intellect and faith