At first, I was highly impressed by these nineteenth-century orations, the hierarchy of clauses and subordinate clauses, but week by week I became quietly enraged at this incomprehensible appeal to divinity. Even in smaller groups, like Sunday school, which often began with a short prayer led by the teacher, you’d be hard-pressed to hear genuine expressions of specific human suffering. “Are there any prayer requests?” the teacher would ask. Sometimes, a hand would go up, but it was always a prayer request for somebody’s great-aunt who needed a hip replacement, a biopsy, a cornea transplant. We
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