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In January my mother wanted to go to North Carolina to where she had grown up. We went to this little Methodist church, not because she was religious, she just wanted to see her friends.

When we got there, I was really moved to just go up to the altar and give my life to the Lord. It wasn't even an altar call. It was a communion call. The guy said, you don't have to be a member of any church to take communion. You just have to believe that Jesus Christ lived, that he died for your sins, and you have to want him in your life. And when he said that, I was so powerfully moved that I actually thought, even if a tornado rips through this building, I'm going to get that communion.

I took the communion, and I didn't even listen to the guy. I knelt down and I said, "Please come and get me. Please come and get me. Please come and get me." And when I took the communion and I said that, I felt free. I felt like tons of things had been lifted off of me. And I began to have an insatiable desire to read the Bible.

Romans 1 says God is obvious to everyone and people's minds who deny him become darkened. And though they think themselves wise they're actually foolish. That was me. But the Scriptures began to heal my mind so I could actually think again.

How did you end up at Mother Teresa's, and how did that radicalize you?

I saw a film in this monastery about Mother Teresa. She said her work wasn't social work—it was religious work. And I knew my work was social work. I just kept feeling I had to intellectually understand the difference, and the only way I could do that is to work there. So I wrote her a letter.

I went there and worked for a little over two months. And I would work from 5:30 in the morning 'til about 1:00 in the afternoon, primarily with sick babies. Then I would go to the room I rented and study the Scriptures.

I didn't realized how radicalized I had become until I went back to the university after that experience. I would begin to prepare my classes to teach in September and I would start to weep. I'm not really an emotional kind of person. I'd get myself together, go to class and things would be fine. That happened for about two months. Then I was invited to speak at a school administrators' meeting up north.

The women's school administrators invited me to speak about Mother Teresa at a breakfast. A woman stood up during the question and answer session and said, "Did you have any trouble coming back from Mother Teresa's?" And I started to weep again.

Because I was so stunned that he finally showed me why I was weeping, I just blurted it out in front of this group. I said, "You know, I have now seen radical, or the real, Christianity lived. I know what it is. I totally believe it. And now, when I go to prepare my class I know that I'm teaching something else. And I feel like a liar."

When I realized what it was, there was a sense of relief. I was teaching only secular theories. I wasn't telling the students what I would call the whole truth about poverty, about Christ. And so I began to struggle. I had prayed to the Lord to take me out of Claremont. He hadn't done it. And I needed to learn how to stay there. I needed to learn how to integrate.

How would you describe what you're learning about doing this integrative work at Claremont?

Initially my first response was to think that all secular theories were false. And they're not. They're only partially false. Because evil cannot create anything, so evil can't create a philosophy. It wouldn't stand if it were totally false.

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December (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47