I hadn't yet read his book when I arranged to meet Tom Levinson, now a second-year law student at the University of Chicago Law School, during his Boston-Cambridge-Wellesley book tour. So when I turned on the recorder and he and I talked for an hour across a round glass table in the entryway of The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, I didn't see as clearly then as I did later: Levinson's interview saga was continuing, but with roles reversed. Now he was the interviewee, and I was playing his role as interviewer of a fellow traveler on the spiritual highway of life. Since none of the interviews for his book had included a Christian Scientist, it seemed all the more fitting that we should find ourselves speaking together.
How would you describe the current landscape of religion in America?
In large measure, people in America are defining religion for themselves. They're defining their faith based on their own insights, based on their own communities. There are a lot of people crossing boundaries, moving from one religion to another, and I think that's part of the fact that people are definitely interested in the subject and that people's experiences are determining the contours of their faith. We're not a culture that worships based on what we have been handed down dogmatically. We're a culture that goes out and tries it for ourselves.
