"Behind the parliamentary exterior, he's kind of a romantic," says Richard Bennett '85-'86, Melendez's best friend and secretary of the council when Brian was chairman. "He has dreams and fears and feelings like everybody else."

ONE CAN GO A long way toward explaining the Melendez persona by looking at how he arrived at Harvard. His route to Cambridge brought him a long way from the fundamentalist, born-again Christian community in Ocala, Florida to which he moved at age six. His family, he says, "is really into the Pentacostal, fundamentalists Bible-thumping revivalist tradition of born-again Christianity" associated with the Moral Majority. For much of his childhood, his family also was quite poor, living "in a mobile home in a dingy little trailer park in the outskirts of town." He says, however, that his family has become more financially secure in recent years.

The Harvard culture shock caused Melendez to re-evaluate a whole series of beliefs and values that had become intuitive in the almost homogeneous world of his childhood. "By the time I came to college I thought I was pretty secure in what my religion was about," Melendez says. "But since I've been at Harvard I've just been hit with the most wonderful challenges to what I believe."

Melendez has, in the past four years, made a number of revisions in his world view, attempting to reconcile his intellectual liberalism with his conservative religious beliefs. As a result, he has found himself far to the left of mainstream fundamentalism, defending "a fairly radical interpretation of the gospels that I think is something my Harvard experience has brought about."

He says, "I regard the entire academic experience as trying to find the proof of faith through reason--and probably most born-again Christians will tell you that you can't prove faith through reason, faith is faith and that is the end of the matter. But I don't buy that."

THE CONFLICTING PULLS of faith and intellect left him at one point last year coping with what he calls a "pretty serious emotional trauma" that caused him to withdraw to his room for two weeks. Melendez says close friends--whom he only half-jokingly calls his "Board of Directors"--"stayed with me all the time, conducted my affairs, ran the Undergraduate Council for me, and basically represented me to the world so that nobody knew I was having problems--and talked me through it until I recovered."

The Harvard experience has also created something of a gap between the new Brian and his mother and step-father in Florida (Brian's original parents divorced when he was six). Brian recounts how he told his mother that he would be sharing a house this summer with two women (Touhey and her older sister). His mother wrote back a letter chastising him for living with members of the opposite sex, concluding: "Maybe I'm old-fashioned or just have higher moral standards."

"I can deal without that kind of smug, judgmental Christianity," Brian retorts. "That's not what Christianity is all about."

Melendez, in trademark style, wrote his mother a 15-page letter refuting every objection she made to his summer roommates. He says, "My attitude toward that kind of living arrangement is there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. My parents are of the opinion that it carries some kind of stigma of immorality, but the basis of that is their upbringing, not any kind of moral standard."

Dolores Melendez, for her part, says she is confident that her son's rethinking of Christianity will not lead him away from the church. "I can't forsee him turning his back on Christianity," she says. But she warns, "I see a little bit of secular humanism creeping in." Does she condemn that? "No," she says. "I'm not his judge, I'm his mother."

Brian says he has come to no final conclusions about his world-view but is confident that Jesus Christ fits comfortably within it. Though he now has a girlfriend, he continues to forswear drink and drugs.

"We would joke about the premarital sex issue," says Touhey. "But whether he goes home and prays for me I have no idea."

Brian says of his religion, "I'm comfortable enough with it now that I can walk off into the Christian community and feel like a part of it, but still be sort of a thorn in the side of mainstream Christianity because I accept it in the context of this liberal, intellectual tradition."

Melendez's newfound intellectual beliefs mean, however, "that for the rest of my life I'm going to be confronting the kind of conservative--I almost want to say Republican--Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell Christianity with my liberal, intellectual Christianity."

Melendez continues, "There's a message that needs to be brought from the academic community to the Christian community which is that you should celebrate your religion in the tradition of the larger pluralistic culture which we're a part, rather than celebrate it as a crusade against the evil that dwells in everything that you're not a part of."