How Condi Came Back

President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice is a preacher's kid. She grew up in church. But in her mid-20s, she found she had drifted from her Christian faith.

Rice told this story at a Sunday school class at National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. in August 2002:

Although I never doubted the existence of God, I think like all people I've had some ups and downs in my faith. When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly … I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad.

[One] Sunday morning, I went to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church [in Palo Alto]. The minister that Sunday morning gave a sermon I will never quite forget. It was about the Prodigal Son from the point of view of the elder son.

It set the elder son up not as somebody who had done all the right things but as somebody who had become so self-satisfied; a parable about ...