Owen E Clark MD

A Bishop in Sneakers Owen E Clark MD

Sneakers! A present from the Primary children. He wears them in their honor, laying aside his customary Birkenstocks. He knows the conventions of Mormon culture. Priesthood leaders sitting on the stand are to wear a white shirt, dark-colored suit and black shoes. He also knows the ways of the secular world, the mindset of the hippy generation, the pretensions of the educated, and the distain of secular elites for superstitious religious zealots. His life bridges traditional Mormon culture and the outside world. A fourth-generation Mormon raised on an Idaho ranch, he moved into the modern secular world. He was raised to place canvas dams in order to irrigate the fields of the mountain valleys and to herd the cattle into their summer grazing lands. He also sat in the ivory halls of Harvard and Yale on the East Coast and trained in basic medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Oregon in Portland. His life task was to synthesize these two worlds in his own life course. He worked as a psychiatrist while serving as bishop for 8 1/2 years, . On Sundays he juggled the timing of making his hospital rounds around the annual shifting of the meeting schedule of his ward. His congregation included graduate university students, many struggling to reconcile their secular learning with their traditional Mormon upbringing, and the inner-city