I grew up in a Southern fundamentalist preacher’s family, and as a 12-year-old declared that God had called me to be a preacher. But then, decades ago, I decided that I couldn’t possibly be a Christian if being a Christian meant being intolerant, bigoted, and hypocritical, if it meant being unconcerned about poverty and racism, disdaining the protection of God’s creation, and worshipping massive, organized violence in defense of a bloated and unjust empire.
When I was eighteen years old in the spring of 1968, in a book store on the square in Racine, Wisconsin, I found a little book titled Man’s Search for Meaning, by philosopher and psychotherapist Victor Frankl. The author survived Auschwitz during the Second World War. He emerged from the death camp having lost everything that mattered to him. His beloved wife was dead, his family was dead, almost all of his friends or acquaintances were dead or dying.
