[June 2001 journal entry]
I have been asking again – Why am I so deeply and persistently engaged with questions regarding interpretation? Why am I constantly ‘under the house examining the foundation’? Why do I insist on consistency of thought down into the deep roots?
- The ideas common to the ‘religious’ sphere crumbled for me under the combined weight/pressure of exposure to the depth/breadth of human suffering and commitment to an unrestricted exercise of the methods for historical inquiry I acquired through my doctoral work.
- By the early 1980s, my defining experiences were coming increasingly from outside the ‘religious’ sphere with medical students, residents, academic physicians, and practicing physicians – secular as well as religious and in many other ways very diverse – where thinking ‘from below’ and thinking scientifically ground the practice of medicine.
- My most intimate experience of ‘community’ began by the early 1980s and had fully formed by the early 1990s with a core of (now about twenty) physicians to whom I was drawn by a shared set of values and by a shared way of being (though we come from a variety of backgrounds).
