ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

No, not the movie; that one does not make my top 10 scary movies list at all. This is one of those boring personal rumination posts. If you want something more interesting to read, I recommend this Craiglist posting of someone’s attempt to sell a crappy futon, and you’re welcome.

When I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I felt like I was on fire. I did 16-17.5 credits every semester and almost always got a GPA of 3.8 or better until my senior year when I slacked off a bit. I won the Honors writing contest with an essay I wrote my first semester there. I juggled learning biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew and Latin and Greek at the same time. I was an officer in the Tae Kwon Do club, the Evangelical Christian club, and the classics honor society Eta Sigma Phi. I kept my plate full, and I did well at it, and I loved it. People said I was going to be the next Jan Shipps, and I thought so, too.

Then I graduated and started my MA in American History at the University of Utah, and everything in my personal life went wrong all at once. I got pregnant at the start of the school year, and being a pregnant graduate student was not something I knew how to deal with. My husband was in a car accident and our car was totaled so that my main means of commuting from Provo to Salt Lake City for classes was ruined. I got fired from a job for the first time in my life. The doctors discovered mysterious lumps in my mother’s arms and breast; they say it was unrelated to the pancreatic cancer she later developed, but it still sent me into insane worry. I sort of stopped going to classes, and I sort of got Es in all of them. 18 painful credits worth of graduate level coursework with Es.

I’ve spent the past two years feeling like a loser who dropped out of a competitive graduate program and gave up a promising future in historical scholarship mainly because I got knocked up. I’ve tried telling myself that being a mother to my special needs daughter is a higher calling, but it’s been cold comfort. Why can’t I have both? Why didn’t I do both? More importantly, is it too late to do both? Is there any program in this country that will accept someone with a good undergraduate record, good GRE scores, and a horrible tragedy of a first attempt at graduate school?

I can’t win if I don’t play.

So, I’m filing a petition with the University of Utah to turn my Es into Ws. It’s a long shot but a year’s worth of Ws would be better than a year’s worth of Es.

As to where I might go: years ago, a group of students from Trinity International University andTrinity Evangelical Divinity School came to the BYU campus. I liked them a lot, we got along well. They encouraged me to consider applying to TEDS for graduate school, and the only reason I did not apply there originally was that my husband was still finishing college in Utah when I graduated. So that’s one possibility.

The TEDS dream is part of a bigger dream though. I took off for BYU at such a young age. I know so much about Mormon history, theology and interpretation of the Bible, I sometimes question how well I know my own faith. I’m proud of my knowledge of Mormonism, but I’m not ignorant of what I gave up in choosing an LDS undergraduate experience over one with my own faith. Can I recover some of what I lost? Besides, has any evangelical ever entered the current LDS-Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue movement with a degree from both BYU and a solid evangelical institution?

The downside to TEDS is that Illinois is so far away, and I can already tell that my grieving father won’t like seeing me move across the country again. So I am looking at some closer evangelical colleges. I don’t know how they’ll feel about my history with BYU, nor do I know what they’ll think of my botched year at the University of Utah.

I do know there’s only one way to find out.