Word: mormon
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...This is an exceptionally strong community” says Susan K. Davidson ’02. “The members are coming out on a limb as it is, to be Mormon in such a diverse community,” Davidson says. “It doesn’t make sense to shirk questions about religion. If you believe in the faith, you should be able to defend or explain...
Believing in the faith is a key element of Mormonism at Harvard, because coming to Harvard over the more traditional route to the Mormon-run Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, necessarily forces students out on the limb Davidson mentions—and the choice is deliberate. “I came to Harvard to have exposure to new ideas and different perspectives than what I got from my parents,” says Benjamin W. Jarvis...
...virtue of being at Harvard, most Mormons here have taken a relatively more liberal or unconventional path than most college-age Mormons. Perhaps none so unconventional as that of Davidson, who did not convert to the religion until the summer after she graduated from high school. Davidson is from Butler, Pa., near Pittsburgh, and was raised in a Presbyterian home. She was crowned America’s Junior Miss in 1998 and, as a result, participated in a community service program in Hawaii. Davidson remembers that the leader of her program leader was a Mormon, and Davidson was intrigued...
...Jarvis, who was born into a Mormon family, the Harvard experience has reinforced the importance of the Mormon faith in his life. “I was genuinely trying to figure out what I thought about the world,” Jarvis remembers of his first year. He identifies his first-year self as “pretty agnostic” but through conversing with his roommate, an evangelical Christian, he was prompted to evaluate his own faith and get interested in philosophy. Jarvis says he realized the only way to find out about faith...
There is substantial pressure for young men in the Mormon Church to go on missions. For many Harvard students, this can mean leaving for a mission site after their first year or their 19th birthday. For Jarvis, this was not an entirely pleasant experience. After a month of training in Utah, he left in the summer of 1997 for Spain, a country notorious for anti-Mormon sentiment. Two years of knocking on doors to offer prepared lectures on the Mormon doctrine was “really difficult a lot of the time,” relates Jarvis...