Presented to: Adam Miller
For: the body of his work published in 2011
This award goes to Adam Miller for his several essays, in print and online, during 2011 (including especially "Take No Thought," "Recompense," and "Faith, Philosophy, Scripture") which achieve an unprecedented and superb combination of philosophical depth and poetic expression. Adam Miller's work represents an original contribution to Mormon letters for its deep theological probings of experience, its nuanced readings of scripture, and its unique transformation of the review essay into its own creative and improvisational articulation of philosophical principles in prose that reads like poetry. In these essays, Miller raises the task of reading and of writing philosophy to a high art. Often directed at the reader in the second person, his voice manages to be pedagogically powerful and transcendent as well as intimate and grounded in personality. These essays are a more generous and more expansive treatment of Mormon thought than any merely expository writing or standard review could accomplish, and they advance a new way of thinking collectively as a people, challenging his readers to rise to the deepest ethical and intellectual implications of doctrinal belief.