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PROLOGUE 1 When I was ten years old, my fifth-grade teacher used to make an announcement every week that I never quite understood. It had something to do with “catechism class.” The second word was a cinch. Even I comprehended it. But “catechism”? It seemed like another language, maybe from another planet. The announcement would always come around two o’clock, usually on a Wednesday or Thursday. Almost two-thirds of the class would tidy up their desks, bolt out of their seats, and just about skip out of James Madison Elementary School, a two-story brick building surrounded by a chinhigh metal fence painted a not-very-attractive lime green. At James Madison , hoisting the American flag to the top of the pole in front of the school early in the morning was a high honor, almost as distinguished as carrying the erasers down to the basement at the end of the day and sucking gusts of chalky dust out of them with a vacuum cleaner that some goofy inventor had devised for that very purpose. But in my eyes, the greatest honor of all was to be among those lucky kids who dashed out of this school in bleak Scranton, Pennsylvania. I admired how clever they were. Clearly they were privy to a secret, and they were keeping it to themselves: not just how to get out of school ninety minutes early but also how to escape our teacher, Miss Dyer, whom we feared and loathed. A bully and a tyrant, she humiliated at least one of us every day in front of the entire class—teasing, scolding, or just plain chewing out some poor sucker. Her class was a gulag, a stalag, a slammer for fifth graders. From 9:00 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, we held our breath, never knowing when she would strike or whom she would pounce on. Anyone who fig- ured out how to get away from Miss Dyer, even for something I did not comprehend—like “catechism”—automatically went up in my esteem. Many years later—decades later, in fact—I’d learn that catechism was more of a mystery than I’d dreamed back in Scranton. In their church a few blocks from school, within thick stone walls and beneath a spire so tall it seemed (from my short grade-school perspective) almost to touch the sky, the Catholic kids were being instructed in the fundamentals of sin and salvation, two lofty abstractions that exceeded the cramped comprehension of most fifth graders. Most likely those kids knew only that they were hearing serious words with serious implications. Beyond that, such ideas were better left to adults to figure out, which was pretty much how we felt at that age about anything that was grave and somber and had the weight of the world resting on it. Of course, I didn’t know that the way the catechism was learned— committing to memory volumes of questions and answers and being drilled on them again and again—could be traced all the way back to the ancient Jewish rabbis and teachers, who were fond of posing and then answering questions, in a sort of one-man Socratic dialogue a few centuries before Socrates was even born. Jesus, who was well aware of the power of questions , often used the same approach in the impromptu sermons he delivered in villages and synagogues throughout ancient Palestine: “What think ye of Christ?” “Who do men say that the son of man is?” “Who do ye say that I am?” Question after question challenged Jews’ lack of faith, their corruption, their dull inability to realize that they were living in apocalyptic times, that Armageddon itself might break out before sundown. Jesus wanted to shake people up, make them change their ways before it was too late: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” “Why do ye transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?” “O ye hypocrites , can ye not discern the signs of the times?” Even as Jesus’ strength drained while hanging from the cross, one last question was left in him: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”—“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Then he was quiet, but far from forgotten. The question mark, then, characterized Christianity from its start, a mode of learning and preaching that Christians inherited from their Jewish brothers. Questions took people on quests; occasionally, questions actually led to answers. I didn’t...

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