In the middle of March, 1961, a minister named Duffy splashed water on my head in the middle of a Sunday morning worship service. I was only one of a half dozen "Baby Boomers" whose parents had recently petitioned the Session for the sacrament of baptism. Having recently moved to a trailer park in Akron, Ohio, my parents thought the time seemed right to make their firstborn infant a Presbyterian.

The sacrament went rather easily. The only reported glitch was the last-minute discovery that my father had not, himself, ever been baptized. The minister discovered this fact somehow, probably to my parents' embarrassment. And so, about half an hour before the worship service, my dad got his forehead splashed in the pastor's study. "First things first," declared Reverend Duffy. I have reflected …