In September 1974 I took my first airline flight, headed to Harvard Divinity School. I was a child of the working class in mid-Michigan and a new graduate of the local Alma College who would not have made it into college had I not been a high-profile athlete in a large sports-factory high school. In college I gradually transferred my sports perfectionism to social-justice activism and things intellectual, with no intention of becoming an academic. My calling to solidarity activism felt certain; my calling to ordained ministry was much less certain, since I didn’t belong to a church. My family was nominally Catholic; Martin Luther King Jr. had been my lodestar since the ninth grade; I acquired a second lodestar in college by reading Christian socialist icon Walter Rauschenbusch; and I plunged into the post-Kantian liberal Protestant theologies and philosophies that later filled my own books on these subjects. As a shy loner who read too much, I would have been marked out in high school for social ostracism had I not been a sports star. At Alma College, romantic heartbreak sent me spiraling into a hellish loneliness that devoured me for four years. Harvard Divinity School (HDS) loomed as my chance for a reset, though I feared that I would be exposed as a self-taught bumpkin.

On the flight, I read an ad for a Franciscan community that gently asked readers if they might have a religious vocation. “If I flunk out of Harvard,” I thought, “I can join the Franciscans; it will be all right.” I expected to be less unusual at HDS than I had been at Alma, except in a bad way. Surely, I would compare poorly to classmates who were raised to go to Harvard. The prospect of meeting Harvard professors terrified me: They would peg me correctly as a rube who didn’t belong, I would acknowledge it contritely, and perhaps they would cut me a break. That was the optimistic scenario; otherwise, it would be the Franciscans for me. My first week was a thrilling whirl of befriending Divinity Hall dormmates, exploring the North End of Boston, and eating my first-ever restaurant meals involving silverware and waitresses.

In my first semester, Michael Harrington came to Harvard to promote his new organization, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). He wore a corduroy jacket and blue work-shirt, and endured the customary introduction that always made him cringe: “Michael Harrington is the author of The Other America, the book that launched the war on poverty, and the successor of Norman Thomas, the great Socialist leader of the mid-twentieth century.” Mike gently reintroduced himself. He said he had also written books titled Toward a Democratic Left and Socialism. Perhaps some of you would be interested in these books? They mattered far more to him than The Other America, a puffed-up version of a magazine article he had written during his Greyhound bus years as an organizer for the Socialist Party. This book had burnished him with writer-fame as a liberal political journalist, not as the organic intellectual who learned his Marxism in the socialist movement. Mike could hear his epitaph in these introductions: “Wrote The Other America, downhill after that.” As for succeeding Thomas, he blushed at the title. In 1974, Mike was just beginning to earn it.

I joined DSOC at Harrington’s Harvard lecture. Soon there were chapter meetings and actions to organize, and meetings with Boston DSOC, where a venerable lion of the Jewish Labor Committee, Julius Bernstein, was our leader. We showed up for solidarity support wherever a local union was on strike. Our university chapter had a charismatic undergraduate leader, Nick Minard, who picketed for the Harvard printers’ union and passed out leaflets in Harvard Yard asking students to think about the poverty and powerlessness of miners. Nick suffered the suffering of people he never met. In January 1975 he threw himself off the William James building, plunging to his death. We were left with a stricken sorrow at a brilliant life tragically cut short and a cautionary example of holding unbearable burdens too closely.

Meanwhile I worked the midnight-to-eight shift on weekdays as a security guard for Harvard University, patrolling its grounds and buildings, changing clothes in a restroom before entering class. Being seen by professors and classmates in my uniform would have been mortifying. My first year at HDS was a blur of struggling to stay awake through classes. The next year I landed a job as the superintendent of an apartment building owned by renowned architect Eduardo Catalano, which he was converting to condos. Restored to normal hours, I became a runner, taking ninety-minute runs up and down the magnificent Charles River and around Fresh Pond. Two of our condo buyers were incoming Harvard law students—Winthrop Gardner Minot and Spencer Abraham. Win was a New England blueblood by any of his names, later going into corporate law; Spencer came up from an immigrant business-family background in East Lansing, Michigan, to become a conservative Republican U.S. senator. Both were skittish that the guy who shoveled their parking lot and fixed their plumbing was a fellow student, but I was thrilled to have a job providing an apartment and discretionary time.

My parents and four brothers seized this opportunity in the summer of 1975 by driving out to my two-room flat. They were joyous and joyously received. I took them to Fenway Park and through the Freedom Trail, exhausting my sparse knowledge of Boston cultural sites. This was the fabulous Boston Red Sox summer in which Fred Lynn and Jim Rice were rookies. Even my diehard Detroit Tigers family enjoyed the magic of that Red Sox summer. One night it was time for the secret: my teenaged brother Andy had disappeared that spring, made his way to our grandmother’s house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and tried to kill himself by consuming a bottle of pills. He and my mother pulled me aside to tell me that he had narrowly escaped dying. I was shocked, fighting back tears. It terrified me to think that he had nearly died, but I struggled to keep my composure, aware that an overreaction might trigger him. I told him that I knew something about wanting to kill yourself, because I had felt that way many times. He was surprised by this news, but also curious, asking, what did you do? I blurted out the truth, lacking the time to think about it: Whenever I got close to it, I remembered that I should first give sunny California a try. Maybe my longtime fantasy about moving to California meant something. Maybe he had a similar fantasy that could work for him?

In December 1976 my four impacted wisdom teeth had to come out, so my mother flew out to be with me for the surgery. We had a lovely day in Boston interspersed with a Lina Wertmüller film, and I bought my first bottle of bourbon, wisely informed that I would need it. The procedure went badly, lasting twice as long as expected. For five days I consumed only broth and bourbon. My friends John McDargh and Robin Lovin, both doctoral students at Harvard, came for visits, bantering easily with my mother, to my delight. At week’s end my mother flew home, and John undertook his comprehensive exams, which at Harvard are taken together in a two-hour block. Theologian Richard R. Niebuhr, one of John’s examiners, declared, “We believe that you have done very well.” John was ecstatic, we went out for ice cream to celebrate, and it struck me that it took only a few words of understated commendation from these professors to thrill us.

When I returned home from the ice cream, the phone was ringing. My mother was on the other end, crying: “Honey, we’ve lost Andy. They say he killed himself, with the shotgun.” Blackout. I remember nothing of the next ninety minutes. “They say” registered my mother’s disbelief, but I don’t know if I caught it. I must have called John or Robin, because they came, as did my boss Deborah Forsman, who came with Mr. Catalano, who pressed three $100 bills into my hand for the flight. The following morning, I had my first solid food in a week, a bit of chili on the flight, and arrived home.

My youngest brother, Eric, had come home from intermediate school to find Andy blown apart outside his bedroom in the basement. We sat in the spot where shots had been fired into his chest and head. My father wept, a surreal sight to me. Eric was frozen in traumatized silence. I learned that my brother Greg had flipped his car on the state highway racing home; we nearly lost Greg the same day as Andy. Some of our questions assumed a suicide premise, which my mother vehemently disputed, which stymied what could be asked or said.

We stared at each other with a mute terror. Andy had sold small quantities of pot for a dealer from Saginaw, had been caught by the police officer who lived in our neighborhood, and had identified the dealer to the police. Then he feared for his life, telling my mother that the dealer was going to kill him. She had come home at lunchtime to urge him not to miss a job interview. At noon, Andy had been fine. Two hours later he was shot twice. There was evidence of a physical struggle, with broken light fixtures and damaged furniture; then the police compounded the damage by ripping apart ceilings and closets in search of nonexistent drugs. They called his death a suicide, which kept the lid on their investigation of the drug ring. A few months later, the police got the bust that Andy’s testimony enabled. My brothers and I never compared notes on who believes the suicide story—one measure of the fraught trauma that has gripped my family ever since.

For two months I stayed with my family in this nightmare state, through the funeral, the cards from friends and relatives, the evenings of poring over photograph albums with my mother, and the searing recollections of Andy’s life. All those years that she poured herself out for him had come to this cruel ending. My brothers had conflicted memories of Andy’s impact upon them, but my mother’s feelings trumped everything for us, so it took many years for the memories to trickle out. Our tenuous Catholicism came to an end. My mother was done with Church observance and God, my father and brothers followed her lead, and Christmas became a memory of the catastrophe of December 1976. Any kind of God-talk in our situation would have felt boorishly offensive. I sympathized with this feeling without adopting it. Growing up tenuously Catholic in a spiritual wasteland had inoculated me from wanting to be free of religion. At the same time, I realized that the intellectual theologies that fed me were utterly foreign and meaningless to my family. My spiritual temperament had led me to a worldview steeped in Martin Luther King Jr. and post-Kantian idealism that I had no desire to relinquish.

I needed to be alone. Staying in Michigan was out of the question, but so was returning to Cambridge, because I had friends there. I didn’t want to be with people who knew I was suffering. I especially didn’t want to talk about it, so I had to be among people who didn’t know me. I called Union Theological Seminary on the phone and was put through to the acting dean of the faculty, Robert Handy, who told me not to worry about transcripts or any such thing. Just come, he said; we have a place for you. A week later I flew back to Cambridge, packed my books into a U-Haul, and drove to 3041 Broadway in New York City.

The Collegiate Gothic buildings of Union Theological Seminary were as picturesque and dramatic as the pictures I had seen over the years. I unloaded my books in a second-floor room of McGiffert Hall, deposited the U-Haul downtown in Chelsea, took my first subway ride on the 1 train back to Union, and met Handy. He turned my hodgepodge of Harvard theology and philosophy courses into two years of Union transfer credits, decreeing unilaterally that Union’s Master of Divinity requirements in preaching, fieldwork, and practical theology could be waived, but I would need to load up on biblical studies and take some Church history. That was fine with me because Raymond E. Brown taught Bible at Union and Handy taught Church history. If I could keep my brain occupied with distributive requirements while the rest of me shut down in reclusive depression, so be it.

HDS dean Krister Stendahl was an iconic figure in theological education. He had swung Christian Testament scholarship away from its conception of Paul as an angst-ridden individual struggling with his conscience, and later served as bishop of Stockholm in the Church of Sweden. During my first year at HDS, Stendahl had taken a sabbatical to write the Anchor Bible commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. When he returned, he said he had read enough of Raymond Brown’s massive work on the Gospel of John to decide that, if that was the new model of an Anchor commentary, he would not be writing the commentary on Romans. Brown’s encyclopedic command of the history of biblical interpretation raised the bar on what constitutes a Bible commentary. He extensively summarized what scholars said before him while delivering his own strong, clear, cogent analyses and judgments. His classes were showcases of exegesis and interpretation, always sprinkled with a literature review.

Brown—“Ray” to his friends—was an orthodox Roman Catholic priest (Sulpician) who preached on weekday mornings across the street from Union at Corpus Christi parish. I heard him preach many times on weekday mornings before hearing him lecture the same morning. He invited me to his apartment, accepted that I didn’t talk about myself, and told me what it was like for him in his early career, a priest ordained in 1953 who lacked any inkling that Vatican II would occur. The first Catholic theologians to get an exemption from the anti-modernist encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius X were biblical scholars. In 1943, Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu called for new translations of the Bible into vernacular languages using early manuscripts instead of the Latin Vulgate, which legitimized textual criticism, permitting use of the historical-critical method within boundaries drawn by Catholic doctrine. Ray said he had clung for over a decade to Divino afflante Spiritu. It was just enough to legitimize his scholarship, until Vatican II issued the dogmatic constitution Dei verbum in 1965, which opened the door to a non-inerrancy doctrine of biblical infallibility: Scripture is infallible for its saving purpose, not in its reportage of incidental details. The first volume of Ray’s historic Gospel According to John came out the following year.

Form criticism, a method developed by German scholars Hermann Gunkel, Martin Noth, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann, classifies units of Scripture into distinct literary patterns such as poetry, proverbial saying, legend, and the like, investigating the oral transmission of each type to identify the original genre. Redaction criticism focuses on the process by which editors shape texts to achieve distinct theological or ideological purposes. German scholars Günther Bornkamm, Hans Conzelmann, and Willi Marxsen developed the redaction critical method of comparing accounts, analyzing recurrent motifs and themes, and dissecting editorial word choices and styles. In the classroom Ray paid due respect to form critics, but specialized in redaction criticism, often finding the hand of a redactor in the most innocuous-looking text. The latter discoveries could be unsettling. A few times they took my breath away, as I thought: “Oh my God, it’s all made up. It’s fiction all the way down.” But there was Ray, at the lectern in his clerical collar, delivering another load of editorial redaction, while prizing his Catholic orthodoxy and the imprimaturs that bishops stamped on his books. In the Society of Biblical Literature, for which he served as president during my year at Union, Ray occupied the middle ground, exactly where he wanted to be.

I was a sponge for his immense learning, meanwhile taking a job at an educational institute, auditing lectures by James Cone and visiting theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, and showing up for meetings and actions called by New York DSOC. Cone had recently published his major theological work, God of the Oppressed (1975), which responded to critics of his early work and surprisingly adopted MLK’s doctrine of redemptive suffering. Gutiérrez had founded Latin American liberation theology on the argument that theologians must privilege the questions and experiences of oppressed people of faith. Acts of solidarity and praxis come first; liberation theology is secondary reflection shaped by the voices of oppressed people. One day, Gustavo told his class that he had spent the past week reading Walter Rauschenbusch, a revelation to him—why don’t you Americans talk about this American treasure? That emboldened me to approach him after class, telling him that Rauschenbusch had changed my life in college, converting me to Christian socialism. To me, only King was more important than Rauschenbusch.

In October 1977, my Harvard friend Robin Lovin attended a conference in midtown, knocked on my door, and introduced me to Cornel West, who had joined the Union faculty the previous year at the age of twenty-three. I had previously seen Cornel holding forth to a sidewalk crowd at Harvard, but had not met him. He had grown up in Sacramento, California, and heard the Gospel at Shiloh Baptist Church. He cut his teeth politically at Black Panther meetings, admired Malcolm X and MLK, was hooked by Kierkegaard’s struggle with melancholia and mortality, and sailed through Harvard in three years. He entered the doctoral program in philosophy at Princeton, studying under Richard Rorty and Sheldon Wolin, and adopted Rorty’s pragmatic historicism. Wolin persuaded him to drill into the Hegelian Marxist background of the Frankfurt school, so Cornel started with a dissertation on British neo-Hegelian T. H. Green. At Union he switched to the Aristotelian aspects of Marx’s thought and switched again to the ethical values underlying Marx’s critique of capitalism and morality, meanwhile politely enduring critics who told him he didn’t deserve his faculty position. Cain Hope Felder, later a prominent biblical scholar, was a leading chastiser of Cornel; Church historian James Washington, the dearest friend Cornel ever made in the academy, was his rock and ally.

In my room, Cornel headed straight for the Kant and Hegel section. He pulled down the brand-new English edition of Hegel’s Phenomenology translated by A. V. Miller, remarked on my marginal scribblings, and asked, “Is it any good?” He meant the translation, not the Phenomenology. “Yes,” I said, “it’s wonderful, so much better than Baillie, though Miller doesn’t understand the master-slave parable; he thinks it’s pro-colonial apologetics.” Cornel burst out laughing and I thought, “Thank you, Robin; I have met Cornel West.” I knew I would savor the memory for a long time.

Running in Central Park was almost as enjoyable for me as running along the Charles River had been, just before running became a mass activity. It stunned me, years later, when I ran my old routes in Central Park alongside hundreds of others. New York City was battered, dangerous, and reeling in 1977, but all of it was new and interesting to me. I often took the subway to some distant site and ran home, learning the city by running through it. Sometimes I ran past huge piles of rubble, city blocks lacking a single building that hadn’t been torched. One night the lights went out. By the time that I gingerly descended the stairs at Columbia’s Butler Library, I could see buildings on fire and stores being pillaged. New York had careened far out of control, which didn’t stop me from loving it.

I wrote a thesis on the Kantian transcendental frame of Hegelian idealism and never considered staying at Union, since I identified Union with the trauma that brought me there. To make a new beginning, I had to move somewhere else. My frightening school debt was ironically a reason to enroll somewhere, putting off the financial reckoning. Princeton Theological Seminary was nearby, philosopher Diogenes Allen was on the faculty, and enrolling at Yale Divinity School would have required me to borrow twice as much as at PTS. So in January 1978 I rented a U-Haul in Chelsea and drove through a snowstorm to Princeton, hustling the van back to Chelsea in time for the one-day rate. That night I lay awake in my bare former room in McGiffert Hall, vowing to join a church, perhaps an Episcopal church, get on an ordination track, find a paying job in organizing, and break out of my loneliness: “It’s my own fault that I’m so lonely.”

The Episcopal hunch rested on no personal acquaintance whatsoever aside from reading William Temple; I later became an Anglican almost entirely under the influence of his fusion of classic logos theology, Hegel, democratic socialism, and Alfred North Whitehead. Diogenes Allen urged me to put aside Kant and Hegel in favor of G. W. Leibniz’s harmonious Lutheran rationalism. We had strenuous discussions of this matter until I discovered that the special teacher at PTS was psychologist of religion James E. Loder.

I had no real interest in his field. Once at a DSOC meeting in Manhattan, someone asked if anyone knew of a good therapist. No one said yes, and a few of us chuckled self-consciously; we were solidarity organizers who felt at war with the navel-gazing culture of self-obsession. But people said Loder was really good; don’t miss your chance to take him. I saw it immediately. For the first class, he assigned Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859) but said nothing about Kierkegaard. We were there to study transformation, he said. Transformation is about a change into true form. Loder admired the specificity of the behavioral sciences and the willingness of theology to risk ontological statements about human nature. He proposed drawing upon both fields to describe the nature of the human spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit in human experience. The following week there was finally a word about Kierkegaard, who said the point of his vast authorship was to provoke and explore the inner contradictions in his readers, vanishing afterward to let them find their own truth before the Truth.

I took Loder’s courses that expounded his distinctive stew of psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology, theology, and Kierkegaard. He urged me to pursue a doctorate with him, and I said there was no reason for me to do that because I was not going to be an academic; I was an organizer who planned to remain one. I agreed, however, to work with him for an extra year, whittling his sprawling one-thousand-page manuscript titled “Transformations of the Human Spirit.” To Loder, that made me persuadable, and someone who should call him Jim. In his office, in that extra year at PTS, I caught the great break of my life, meeting Brenda Louise Biggs.

Jim was Brenda’s therapist. She was a pistol—irreverent, extroverted, wisecracking, big-hearted, volatile, intense, and opinionated, with a ready laugh, erupting in delight at good jokes and bad ones. She was tiny in size and huge in personality. She smoked three packs of cigarettes per day, cussed like a sailor, and called out BS instantly. I had just begun to go on dates when she asked me, “Would you like to see another movie?” Our first date was in Brenda’s room in Alexander Hall, a television series about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, A Woman Called Moses. It evoked earnest discussion. What would you give your life for? To what are you devoting your life now? We talked all night, telling our stories, and were still talking at breakfast time, so Brenda drove me to her favorite diner on Route One.

She had grown up in the upper-middle class of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Brenda spent summers at the country club swimming pool, campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1968, and became an antiwar Democrat in 1970 at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. As an English major she read depressing novels that repelled her, and vowed that when she got past college, she would read no more so-called high literature. Returning to Bethlehem, Brenda was a nurturing teacher by day and a cruiser of rough bars at night, taking home some of the worst guys she met. This phase ended with an abortion, a tentative visit to an evangelical Bible fellowship at First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem, and her conversion. Two progressive Evangelicals who later joined the Sojourners community, Ginny and Rob Soley, were ringleaders of the fellowship group. Brenda formed deep friendships with them and found a new life.

Evangelical feminism was then in its heyday, a fledgling wing of Evangelicalism boasting young scholars Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Nancy Hardesty, and Letha Dawson Scanzoni. It was a lodestar for women like Brenda and Ginny who prized the spiritual intensity of Evangelical religion and loathed the sexism of Evangelical leaders. The way to a better Evangelicalism was for women like Brenda to become pastors. Ginny and Rob urged Brenda to accept her obvious pastoral calling, and Brenda enrolled at PTS.

She liked and respected most of her professors, yet for two years, PTS disappointed her. It was nothing like the life-changing experience that had propelled Brenda to seminary. Biblical criticism drained the Bible of its spiritual power. Theology courses featured arguments that only academics cared about. PTS felt churchy and nerdy to her, a launchpad for smug males with “Big Steeple Pastor” stamped on their foreheads. She missed the fellowship she had experienced in the group with Ginny and Rob. Brenda’s conversion story elicited shaming glances from classmates, and she nearly quit seminary, but a summer assignment in clinical pastoral education at Rush Memorial Hospital in Chicago reminded her that she had a call to ministry.

Brenda had extraordinary gifts for ministry. Many ministers are too introverted and awkward to be someone you would want to be visited by in the hospital; I later became one of them. Brenda was nothing like that. She breezed into hospital rooms, bantered easily with patients and hospital staff, and teased the patients she knew. Outward-reaching care came naturally to her, as did blunt honesty. When we met, she had just watched the film version of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) for the third time, drawn to its bar-cruising protagonist “like a moth to the flame,” she said. “It’s something I discuss with Loder. And I sure as hell don’t call him Jim.” With characteristic bluntness, she told me that she had never been attracted to a nice boy and couldn’t stand jocks either. Yet near the end of our first date, out on Route One, she was already making plans for me to meet her parents.

Brenda and I had dated for four months when we had to decide about marrying. Even that time frame got squeezed by the demands of applying for positions in the Presbyterian ministry. We could lament the shortness of our courtship, but that wouldn’t change anything. She was heading into the ministry and couldn’t show up with me if we were unmarried. Brenda was all-in and adamantly certain, ready to marry me and to begin her ministerial career. She pressed me for a decision, and I was stunned at how quickly my life had changed. I loved her as much as she loved me. This fact alone would have carried me to yes, but I knew something beyond it: meeting Brenda was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

This essay is adapted from his new memoir, Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life, published by Baylor University Press. Used by permission.