Eugene England

Eugene England was that rarest of creatures—a liberal Mormon. He was a believer, deeply rooted in his inherited faith, and he possessed the small-l liberal virtues of openness to new ideas, a willingness to challenge received wisdom, and confidence in the ethical power of human reason. He found within Mormonism the core of a faith open to modernity in the form of scientific progress, civil rights, an expanded literary canon, and critical approaches to scripture and religious history. This strain of Mormon thought had always existed alongside a more authoritarian and fundamentalist tradition. But it was the charismatic Eugene England who braided together the more liberal strands of Mormon doctrine for a generation of young Mormons and brought them into dialogue with other twentieth-century religious thinkers. His personal essays both celebrated and embodied an important form of Mormon literature. His central intellectual techne, “proving contraries,” and his concepts of paradox and atonement became touchstones for generations of BYU students and amateur scholars of Mormonism. England’s attempts to connect the generous God of his Mormon belief with both the conservative religious culture he grew up in and the liberal academic culture he grew into yielded a body of work—and, more importantly, a life—that sketched a roadmap to what we now recognize as Mormon studies.