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Remembering Thomas W. Mackay

Remembering Thomas W. Mackay

Last updated on: January 8, 2026 at 10:26 pm by Dan Peterson

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Remembering Thomas W. Mackay 2026-01-08T22:26:57-07:00 Dan Peterson

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An authentic dunce’s cap, from the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln, England (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

To some of my critics and its critics, the Interpreter Foundation provides endless inspiration for their conspiracy theories and for their attempts to explain the impenetrable mysteries that their imaginations have summoned into existence concerning it. Here are two recent instances, to which I respond with easily accessible materials from the current, ongoing issue of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship::

Why — cue portentous music — has the Interpreter Foundation had nothing to say about polygamy denialism? Well, it has had something to say about polygamy denialism: Paul Fields, Steven T. Densley Jr., Matthew Roper, and “Historical and Stylometric Evidence for the Authorship of Doctrine and Covenants 132,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 67 (2025) : 1-70

Why — cue ominous music — did Jeff Lindsay leave the Interpreter Foundation? Was it out of disgust at its scandalously unethical behavior and the universally acknowledged moral turpitude and buffoonery of its president? Well, Jeff Lindsay hasn’t left the Interpreter Foundation: He is an active, participating member of its board of directors and is the author of not just one but three articles in the current issue of its journal, including the two that have been most recently published:

I guess that we should probably stop hiding such things in places where our poor critics simply can’t find them. It’s not fair to those unfortunate souls.

Tom Mackay, a bit older and grayer than when I first met him.

I was saddened, just before Christmas, to learn of the death of Thomas W. Mackay, and I said here at the time that I would write up some comments at a future date. It’s taken longer than I had anticipated, but here are a few thoughts:

People whom I admired as a child and as a young man and who had great influence on me are mostly gone now, and those who remain are rapidly leaving. This is a sobering fact.

Tom Mackay was a pivotal influence on me as an undergraduate, and may have been the single professor from whom I took the most classes. He was brilliant, and he could be intimidating, but he was a major help to me in ways that I certainly didn’t deserve. Herewith, a few memories of him:

A view of Stanford University, in California (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

When I first arrived at BYU, fall semesters continued into January, when final exams were given. It offered an opportunity to cram for examinations over Christmas break, but that wasn’t an unmixed blessing: It rather blighted Christmas vacation. On 1 January 1971, Stanford — Professor Mackay’s graduate school — defeated Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Arriving at our Greek final a few days later, he informed us that it was very fortunate for us that Stanford had won. The exam, he said, would have been much tougher had Stanford lost.

The Rose Bowl, not terribly far from where I grew up. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I was at BYU for two full years before my mission. At the end of my last semester before leaving, Professor Mackay approached me and said that he knew that my final exam schedule was really crammed, with all or most of my finals somehow falling on just a couple of days. (How he knew that, I don’t know.) Would I like to take his exam separately, at my own convenience? As I say, I didn’t deserve such help. But I took it.

Looking downstream on the Limmat River in central Zürich, Switzerland
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

I received an “A” for that course. After my mission, a couple of months into my first semester back, Tom approached me and said “Guess what I just found under a pile of papers on my desk!” (His desk was always utter chaos. Some of us joked about the piles on it resembling the multiple layers of Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy.) I had no idea. “I found your final exam from before your mission! Do you want me to grade it?” I could think of no good reason to say Yes — since he had already given me an A for the course, the only possible change, if any, would be downward — so I said “No, thanks.”

The Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall (or St. Gallen) in Switzerland is one of the most historically significant religious and cultural centers in that wonderful country that I love so deeply.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

At one point during my mission in Switzerland, I was stationed in the town of Kloten, which is where the Zürich International Airport is located. I was serving as a zone leader at the time. One day, I received a letter from Tom indicating that he would be arriving in Zürich in a few weeks and then continuing on to eastern Swtizerland, where he would be doing some research in the monastic library in St. Gallen. Could we meet up? He knew the date of his arrival but not yet the flight number, its point of origin, or its landing time. He would send that information shortly, in the hope that we could briefly touch base. As it happened, my companion at the time had also been in a class with Professor Mackay, so we were excited to see him.

But his follow-up letter never came.

On the day of his arrival, though, I woke up at 6 AM, somehow knowing for a certainty that he would be arriving shortly and that we needed to get to the airport as soon as possible if we were to have any hope of meeting him there. Our regulation wake-up time was 6:30 AM. To put this in perspective, you need to understand that I am not now and have never been an early-morning person – except from the other side. I’m a living, walking, breathing violation of Doctrine and Covenants 88:124, despite lifelong efforts at reformation and repentance. In other words, waking up early is not something that I generally or willingly do.

We met him as he was coming off the plane and were able to spend part of the day with him.

I’ve thought about that experience many times since, about the prompting that woke me up and hurried us out the door. What was the point of it? It wouldn’t have spoiled some great eternal plan, so far as I’m aware, if we hadn’t met him. But I can’t deny what happened. And it occurs to me that, if nothing else, it was a reminder that it’s possible to know things in seemingly non-natural ways.

A view to the northeast across a portion of the Provo campus of Brigham Young University
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Our Greek classes, especially the upper division ones, were always very small. Three to six students, typically. So we were always “on” and expected to be prepared. Mostly, we translated. One day, I was translating from the Antigone of Sophocles.

“Dan,” he asked, innocently, “what kind of a participle is that?”

“It’s a circumstantial participle.”

“No, it’s not. But how do we know that it’s not a circumstantial particle?”

But I didn’t know that it wasn’t. I thought it was.

He didn’t help me out. He kept asking more and more questions, and I looked more and more like the complete doofus that, in fact, I was. I was like a live bug pinned to a laboratory cork board, still wriggling but unable to escape.

I was so embarrassed and angry that, after class, I vented to my former missionary companion, Stephen Ricks, where we were sitting in the Harold B. Lee Library’s Ancient Studies Reading Room. He was a graduate student in Classics by then, and he was and is a polyglot linguistic genius.

He was very familiar with Tom Mackay, whom we loved and occasionally really hated. He told me that he had little on his plate for the next day or two that was very urgent, and that he would help me prepare the hundred lines of Sophocles that were my class’s assignment for the following day.

We worked into the wee hours of the night, until the library closed. An especially good resource was a multivolume Vergleichende Grammatik der Indogermanischen Sprachen, of which we made thorough use. By the time we were done, I was equipped to answer any question at all about those hundred lines — not only with regard to classical Greek, but to Proto-Indo-European semantics, Old Irish and Old Latin parallels, cognate Sanskrit verbal forms, and possibly relevant Hittite idioms.

The next day, I arrived in class absolutely itching to display my prodigious learning. I think that Tom must have sensed it. It may have been the only time in my undergraduate career that he didn’t call on me.

The Amphore de Milo, an example of red-figure vase painting (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

On another occasion, all of us had arrived in the classroom but Professor Mackay had not. (He was chronically late to class.) We soon realized that, owing to a variety of factors, none of us was really prepared with the day’s reading. So we deployed our Nuclear Option. We had discussed it on several prior occasions, agreeing that it could probably only be used once and under the most dire of circumstances.

When he came into class, one of us asked him a question about red-figure Attic vase painting. None of us had any particular interest in the topic, but it was a passion of Tom’s. He discoursed to us on the subject for the entire class period. We did no translating that day.

Charles Williams (d. 1945)
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)
Friend of T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and their circles

Tom Mackay’s was one of the most vivid and memorable personalities that I’ve ever encountered. And, so, I’m reminded of a comment made by C. S. Lewis in a letter that he wrote roughly two weeks after the unexpected death of his friend (and fellow “Inkling”) Charles Williams:

Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done – oh, I can’t say what – to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable.

When death meets someone as vital and alive as Thomas W. Mackay, death itself seems somehow diminished. But so, unfortunately, does this mortal sphere. And so we mourn.

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