Carolyn was closest to her father. In her words, she became the son he no longer had. "He taught me how to think," she recalls. She admired him deeply and became a confidant of sorts. When there were business or personal problems to consider, he liked to say to Carolyn, "Come on, honey, let's go walk around this together." In later years, he would ask her to serve as chairman of the board for the Tanner Co., a post she still holds today.

An awakening

Bishop Irish remembers a turning point in her life. She was 14 and bored with school, which came easily to her. She mused out loud that maybe she'd get a job. Her father answered by handing her a volume of essays by Thoreau. She read them, and "I was captivated," she says. "They're very humanistic. That was accessible to me in a way others my age wouldn't have been."

She became a prolific reader. She read the Harvard Classics, Plato, Emerson, Jefferson, Lincoln. She read novels. She memorized some of her readings.

Bishop Irish was always studious, but she was no egghead. She was elected drill mistress of the pep club. She took modern dance with Kathy Hinckley, the future LDS Church president's daughter. She rode her horse around the large plot of land that surrounded her house. She spent a year in New Zealand as an exchange student.

She graduated from Olympus High School, went to summer stock in theater and dance in Colorado, where she hoped to win an invitation to join a dance troupe in New York. A teacher put his arm around her and told her she was too thin-skinned for New York. She reluctantly gave up dancing, although she continued to choreograph productions at Stanford while studying there.

She enrolled at Stanford, married an aspiring lawyer named Lee Irish and transferred to Michigan, where she took an undergraduate degree in philosophy. She moved to England with her husband and earned a master of letters in moral philosophy from Oxford in 1968.

She became a devoted, involved mother of four children — "I was just crazy about my kids, and they're such interesting people," she says — while also teaching. Lee Irish eventually landed a clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court, and eight years later he returned to Michigan to teach law school.

They were married for 28 years, and it ended badly. In 1988, at the age of 48, she was divorced. "That's an area of my life I'm not going to go into a lot," she says. "It's not a happy story except that I have four wonderful children from that marriage. We did the best we could."

By then she had experienced a religious awakening. At the age of 35, she had begun attending church again for the first time since she left home to go to college. "I thought philosophy was going to satisfy my spiritual needs," she says. "I know that sounds stupid, because it doesn't."