As the van rolled down the interstate, Kitty Wells' hillbilly alto rattled the radio speakers; "When you're lookin' at me," she belted out, "you're lookin' at country." In the van were ten of us, all seminary seniors, heading away from our rural South Carolina campus toward the big city of Atlanta, and Kitty Wells had it right: If you were looking at us, you were looking at country.

It was not that we urbanly-challenged folk actually wanted to go to the city; the faculty was forcing us to do so. Terrified that our education in the outlands was forming us into unsophisticated rustics, our professors wanted us to spend a month in the city, grabbing the high-tension wires of urban life. So, we were uprooted from the comforts of home and land and family, dislodged from the pleasures of long, …