Word: lutheranism
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...bluntness tripped her up when she applied for a generous scholarship to Wartburg College in nearby Waverly, Iowa, a liberal-arts four-year institution founded by a Lutheran pastor, where German Lutherans like Rowley's parents sent their working-class kids. One of several finalists for the Regents Scholarship, a four-year ride, she answered honestly when the panel asked her about her major. "I haven't thought much about it. I'm keeping it open," she said. The students who eventually won declared they planned to be missionaries, doctors and lawyers. "I tracked them," she says. "And within...
Watkins has the kind of booming personality that refuses to escape notice. At 13, she was unimpressed that her principal split his time between running her Lutheran school and teaching the seventh-and eighth-graders. If his administrative duties called, he would simply send them out for an hour-long recess. She complained so loudly that the principal was divested of his two hats and left the school a year or so later. "He needed to pay attention," she remembers, "or we weren't going to learn." Then, as now, Watkins voices her views firmly, and she never filibusters...
...megastores, Tomball is at the outer edge of Houston's suburban sprawl. But when Watkins was growing up, it was a no-stoplight town with an oil derrick on each corner. Her ancestors were among the hardy German immigrants who descended in the mid-1800s and helped establish the Lutheran church her mother Shirley Klein Harrington still attends each Sunday. It seemed as if Watkins either knew or was related to everyone in town: One uncle owned the grocery store. Another ran the funeral home. Her aunt was her second-grade teacher...
WATKINS: Certainly my mother is still setting the example for me to follow. My parents divorced when I was 14. Divorce wasn't that common back then, especially in the Lutheran Church. [My mother] said, "I am going up there and kneeling, and I dare them not to give me Communion...
...wear the hijab. Most Muslims in Norway didn't," Roald recalls. "I thought people just wore it when it was windy." After a friend prodded her to study the subject more closely, she concluded that she ought to veil. This external sign of faith seemed harder for her nominally Lutheran family to accept than her new beliefs. Even today, "my mother feels I am singling myself out," she says. "She's embarrassed." But Roald is not. As a convert, she says, she is so self-conscious about other issues, such as doubts about her objectivity as a researcher on religion...