1126: Spencer Nugent: A Jamaican Mormon Story Pt. 3
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2019
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Please join us now for our Mormon Stories Podcast interview with Spencer Nugent. Spencer, along with his parents and sibling, were the first Jamaicans baptized on the island into the Mormon church. Later Spencer’s family moved to Orem, Utah. Spencer attended UVSC and BYU, served a mission to San Antonio, Texas, and became an Industrial Designer. Spencer is a renaissance man of sorts. His many talents/interests include karaoke/music, art, travel, design, drawing, landscape architecture, teaching, etc.
After Spencer was married in the Salt Lake City temple and had two sons, he and his ex-wife eventually experienced a Mormon faith crisis and divorced.
Today’s episode will cover numerous topics, including Mormon cultural imperialism/whitewashing, being black in the Mormon church, Spencer’s mission, male eating disorders, parenting, divorce, faith crises, and finding identity, morality, and community as a black ex-Mormon man in Utah.
Transcript
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| 0:35.2 | So let's change gears now. Thanks for sharing that with us. Let's change gears now and talk about |
| 0:58.4 | it'll probably be a fast journey but you know you come home obviously you got married, you had some kids, |
| 1:04.8 | got divorced and had a faith crisis so take us through some of that. That's a pretty epic story. |
| 1:12.2 | All right. So yeah I got home from my mission. I jumped right into industrial design. |
| 1:21.7 | I just like my mission was focused on excelling and just working as hard as possible. I knew that |
| 1:28.4 | my parents were only able to commit to a certain bit of financial assistance which was one semester. |
| 1:35.8 | So for me college wasn't so much about partying and exploring and any of those things plus I was |
| 1:44.0 | a BYU but I just leaned really heavily into just working as hard as I could. I didn't have a lot |
| 1:52.9 | of experience drawing before. I mean I say drawing because drawing and the visual side of |
| 1:58.1 | industrial design is a fairly strong component of what we do. It's not everything but |
| 2:03.0 | certainly as we capture ideas and communicate those ideas being able to draw is important. So |
| 2:10.0 | switching from a math major to industrial design I just had to work really hard. I didn't have time to |
| 2:15.6 | go to parties or events. I do remember just trying to date and meet people along the way but it wasn't |
| 2:26.2 | I would say a primary focus of mine in college but I did graduate. Actually I think my last two |
| 2:35.3 | semesters I essentially got paid to go to school because of my scholarships and I was teaching as a |
| 2:41.6 | student I was teaching a transportation design class. I had a lot of great experiences got to go to |
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