A Serious Way of Wondering

Though I'm not a churchgoer, for more than sixty years I've read widely in the life and teachings of Jesus; and since at least the age of nine, I've thought of myself as a Christian. This book comes ultimately from those beginnings, but it has a more immediate cause. An explanation will permit me a brief good memory.

As I approach my seventieth birthday, I revert with a special frequency to scenes from early summers (fall and winter have often been grim). One of the best of those stretches was a time I spent at Harvard University when I was twenty-one. In 1954, for two months between my junior and senior years at Duke, I lived through both summer terms on the first floor of Stoughton Hall in the Yard; and I took swift and bracingly rigorous courses in modern American fiction and Victorian poetry (I also audited courses in French Impressionism and European Nationalism). Cambridge, like the other port cities of east-coast America, is a humid swamp from June into late September; but as a North Carolina native, born long before air-conditioning crazed my genetic ... read full excerpt from: A Serious Way of Wondering ebook