Terryl Lynn Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University (BYU). 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. The New York Times referred to his work as "polemical" and "provocative" while Harper's praised him for being "fair-minded and unbiased."