
Those Who Speak, Ch. 3 – ...
November 4, 1962
Right around the time the steeple was being raised into position atop the as yet unnamed new church outside Wellington, Connecticut, a young man christened Cyrus Chamberlain (after a long departed maternal grandfather) sat fidgeting and less than attentive in the back row of a seminary classroom three hundred or so miles away in western upstate New York, listening to (or, more accurately, in attendance at) a lecture being delivered with ironic torpor on the role of fervor in spiritual messages to sedentary audiences. The course was a historic survey of canonical rhetoric and the mid-term paper was due in four days, a paper that Cyrus and his classmates had ostensibly been researching and writing for the past six ...