During the 1960-61 academic year I was a first-year seminarian at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. It snowed that winter the week before Christmas vacation. When we left in mid-March for spring break we had not seen the ground clear of snow since early December. There was a period of two weeks in January-February when the temperature never got above zero. The winter was cold, dark, dreary, and depressing for me.

Being from Concord, North Carolina, I had never experienced so much snow at one time nor for such an extended period of time. It was the first time in my life I had been that far away from home for that length of time. My academic work was challenging and calling for me to rethink and reconstruct a lot of things that I thought had been settled and fixed.

That year …