Louis C. Midgley was born and raised in a suburb of Salt Lake City. He received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of Utah, and, after teaching for a year at Weber State University, he and his wife moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he received his Ph.D. from Brown University in the political science department. He taught the history of political and legal philosophy for thirty-six years at Brigham Young University, from which he retired in 1996.
Dr. Midgley has had an abiding interest in the history of Christian theology. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Paul Tillich, the then-famous German-American Protestant theologian and political theorist/religious-socialist activist. Midgley also studied the writings of other influential Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth. Eventually he took an interest in contemporary Roman Catholic theology, and was also impacted by the work of important Jewish philosophers, including especially Leo Strauss and his disciples.
He has, since 2001, served as an associate editor of the FARMS Review, a publication of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Dr. Midgley served two missions to New Zealand—the first in 1950-52 and the second, with his wife, in 1999-2000, during which they directed the Lorne Street Institute of Religion, in Auckland.
He is married to the former Ireta Troth, of Bountiful, Utah. They are the parents of two sons and a daughter.
FairMormon Conference Talks
Naturalistic Terms: Some Reflections on a Motto and Type of Historical Explanation (2001)
Other Articles
Louis Midgley’s articles in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture
Out of Obscurity: The Story of Nibley’s “Beyond Politics”, Mormon Studies Review 23/1 (2011)
Telling the Larger “Church History” Story, Mormon Studies Review 23/1 (2011)
Editor’s Introduction: A Tidy Garden, The FARMS Review 22/1 (2010)
Editor’s Introduction: The Wedding of Athens and Jerusalem: An Evangelical Perplexity and a Latter-day Saint Answer, The FARMS Review 21/2 (2009)
The Book of Mormon as Record, The FARMS Review 21/1 (2009)
Editor’s Introduction: Debating Evangelicals, The FARMS Review 20/2 (2008)
The Nibley Legacy, The FARMS Review 20/2 (2008)
Preserving and Enlarging the Memory of the Saints, The FARMS Review 19/2 (2007)
Remembrance and the Past, The FARMS Review 19/2 (2007)
Two Stories—One Faith, The FARMS Review 19/1 (2007)
Orders of Submission, The FARMS Review 18/2 (2006)
Editor’s Introduction: Knowing Brother Joseph Again, The FARMS Review 18/1 (2006)
Editor’s Introduction: The First Steps, The FARMS Review 17/1 (2005)
A Mighty Kauri Has Fallen: Hugh Winder Nibley (1910-2005), The FARMS Review 17/1 (2005)
Cowan on the Countercult, The FARMS Review 16/2 (2004)
The Signature Books Saga, The FARMS Review 16/1 (2004)
Editor’s Introduction: On Caliban Mischief, The FARMS Review 15/1 (2003)
Prying into Palmer, The FARMS Review 15/2 (2003)
Faulty Topography, FARMS Review of Books 14/1–2 (2002)
The Legend and Legacy of Fawn Brodie, FARMS Review of Books 13/1 (2001)
Comments on Critical Exchanges, FARMS Review of Books 13/1 (2001)
A “Tangled Web”: The Walter Martin Miasma, FARMS Review of Books 12/1 (2000)
Directions That Diverge: “Jerusalem and Athens” Revisited, FARMS Review of Books 11/1 (1999)
Anti-Mormonism and the Newfangled Countercult Culture, FARMS Review of Books 10/1 (1998)
F. M. Brodie–“The Fasting Hermit and Very Saint of Ignorance”: A Biographer and Her Legend, FARMS Review of Books 8/2 (1996)
The Shipps Odyssey in Retrospect, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 7/2 (1995)
Atheists and Cultural Mormons Promote a Naturalistic Humanism, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 7/1 (1995)
A Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy Challenges Cultural Mormon Neglect of the Book of Mormon: Some Reflections on the “Impact of Modernity”, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6/2 (1994)
The Current Battle over the Book of Mormon: “Is Modernity Itself Somehow Canonical?”, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6/1 (1994)
Playing with Half a Decker: The Countercult Religious Tradition Confronts the Book of Mormon, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 5/1 (1993)
George Dempster Smith, Jr., on the Book of Mormon, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 4/1 (1992)
More Revisionist Legerdemain and the Book of Mormon, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 3/1 (1991)
Prophetic Messages or Dogmatic Theology? Commenting on the Book of Mormon: A Review Essay, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1/1 (1989)