I recently rediscovered the second theology book that captivated me. The first was George Forrell’s The Protestant Faith, assigned to my freshman Religion 100 class at Lenoir-Rhyne by Michael McDaniel. I read a few chapters and was slain in the Spirit, so to speak, with the unarguable conviction that there was no topic I was ever going to care about as much as theology… alas. And here I thought I was going to be a linguist. Anyway, in tears of equal joy and irritation I declared my major, and it’s been downward mobility for me ever since.

But the second book of theology did not provoke irritation or tears at all. It was Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season, first published in 1977 as volume 3 of the Crosswicks Journal series. McDaniel was more indirectly responsible for this one: he and his wife Marjorie let me have the run of their immense personal library and somehow I picked it out among thousands...

Newspaper comics were essential to my upbringing; all the better when collected in flimsy paperbacks and anthologies to permit binge reading as opposed to daily patience. My mom had a stack of 15¢ Peanuts books that I pored over again and again and again. When I was eight or nine I collated every instance I could find of Snoopy's "It was a dark and stormy night" novel and typed it all up on our primitive word processor. I like to think that was one of the first signs of my being a scholar at heart...