Terryl Givens

Terryl Givens is a Latter-day Saint scholar whose books form a recurring node in Kyle’s religious-intellectual reading, especially around faith, doubt, and Mormon theology. He authored Stretching The Heavens, the biography of Eugene England that Kyle reads with a “recurring tension about institutional Mormonism’s relationship with its own thinkers,” and co-authored The Crucible of Doubt with Fiona Givens — read alongside a sustained tension “about creeds, certainty, and how Mormon thought handles disagreement,” pioneering the doubt-as-condition frame.

His influence extends beyond his own books as an interlocutor. In Future Mormon, Adam Miller treats Givens’s The God Who Weeps as “his chief sparring partner,” resisting its claim that the “greatest act of self-revelation” is choosing what to believe and pressing its under-examined Nietzschean problem. Miller also draws on Givens’s account of Mormon “radical materialism” — the claim that in Mormonism “dualism is rewritten as two-tiered monism (spirit as more refined matter), and laws are themselves as eternal as God.” Across these sources, Givens functions as the contemporary theologian whose framing of doubt, materiality, and divine vulnerability Kyle’s reading both adopts and argues against.

Context: Terryl L. Givens is a prominent scholar of Latter-day Saint thought and literature (long at the University of Richmond, later the Maxwell Institute at BYU), known for works including People of Paradox, By the Hand of Mormon, and the books co-written with his wife Fiona Givens. Note: this is a person; the page lives in concepts/ but the subject is an author.

Where this appears

• Stretching The Heavens — Givens’s biography of Eugene England, on institutional Mormonism and its thinkers.
• The Crucible of Doubt — co-authored with Fiona Givens; the doubt-and-faith frame on creeds and certainty.
• Future Mormon — Givens’s The God Who Weeps as Adam Miller’s “chief sparring partner”; the Mormon “radical materialism” thread.