Word: mormons
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Although a junior this year, Matt Thomas first arrived at Harvard in fall 1971, a refugee from the Salt Lake Mormon environment that he had begun to find stifling. He was, he says, just slightly more than a "cultural Mormon": like many Mormons raised in the heavily Mormon atmosphere of Utah or some nearby Western state, he was still troubled by questions about the church. "I did not," the tall, lanky and bearded Kirkland House resident stresses. "want...
That October, Thomas's roommate, an Oregonian named R. Mark Molton '75, asked Thomas to outline the Mormon church. "We called it quits at 5 the next morning," Thomas recalls with a smile. By next March--when Molton converted--Thomas's pedagogical role had "clarified" his own thoughts and doubts. That summer he decided to take up a mission--a two-year period of proselytizing inside or outside the United States--joining a predominantly male group of 18,000 Mormons. (Eleven Harvard undergraduates are out on missions this year.) These years of "dealing consistently with your feelings and with others...
...fact, decided against going on a mission. But several members of the Cambridge church challenged him to try praying, which he had given up three or four years earlier. Gradually, Dewey began to work out his relationship to god through the New Testament and the Book of Mormon...
...year's end Dewey had decided to go on a mission. Although he had requested an English-speaking country because he had no language skill, the Mormon missionary committee sent Dewey to heavily industrialized Alsace-Lorraine, where Thomas would go two years later. Both a test of spiritual commitment and a means of expanding the church, the mission forced Dewey to "work not to become bitter," especially when doors were slammed in his face and, he adds, "I had dogs sicced on me." In one target city of 40,000 in Belgium, Dewey says, "we held meetings in the market...
Kathleen M. Bybee '78 came to Harvard from Salt Lake ("the mecca," she calls it flippantly) with a chip on her shoulder, expecting the worst. "I had read about the persecutions of Mormons in Illinois [where Joseph Smith was pulled from a jail and killed by an angry mob], and I kind of expected a little persecution," she says with a nervous smile that hardly conceals her embarassment at this paranoia. The oldest of seven children ("people always joke about Mormons and Catholics," she adds), Bybee chose Radcliffe over BYU, her parent's favorite. "They were afraid I would fall...