Terryl Lynn Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University (BYU).

[2] 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.

As a young man, he served a mission in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and later graduated from BYU with a degree in comparative literature.

[3] 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.

[4] The New York Times referred to his work as "polemical" and "provocative"[5] while Harper's praised him for being "fair-minded and unbiased.