Today’s guest, the inimitable Terryl Givens, is a career-long academic, scholar, and public intellectual. He did his undergraduate studies at BYU in Comparative Literature before doing graduate work at Cornell in Intellectual History and later earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. As a professor, he taught courses on Religion and Literature at the University of Richmond for over 30 years before moving to Utah to act as a Senior Research Fellow for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Givens is, as my friend and today’s co-host Bronzson says, perhaps the most important LDS thinker of our generation. During his career, he has been incredibly prolific, having published 25 books (and counting) dealing with Mormon studies, history, and philosophy, including such titles as By the Hand of Mormon, The God Who Weeps, and The Crucible of Doubt.
Givens served a mission to São Paulo, Brazil from 1976-1978-a time he calls “pivotal” and “foundational to the rest of his life.” In this episode, we talk about some sources of Givens’ academic inspirations, Latter-day Saint theology as the “most intellectually compelling system of theological thought in the Christian world,” the importance of recognizing “lived Christianity” during the mission, and a whole lot more.
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