Soon there was a much bigger world than the United States and the Roman Catholic Church, which I eventually realized were also paradoxes. The e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”) on American coinage did not include very “many” of its own people (blacks, gays, Native Americans, poor folks, and so on), and as a Christian I finally had to be either Roman or catholic, and I continue to choose the catholic end of that spectrum. Either Jesus is the “savior of the world” (John 4:42), or he is not much of a savior at all. Either America treats the rest of the world democratically, or
