It's called the Capstone Class. Different for every major and required for every graduating senior, it's the first usher into the real world of education meets career meets Christianity. It's the most fun, really, because we sit around with two of our favorite department professors, beside the classmates with whom we've suffered Kafka, Shakespeare and Voltaire, and discuss how literature shapes our worldview and what the heck to do with all these verbs, terms, and bookworms.

Next to The Complete Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor Collection, Graham Greene, and The Christian Perspective, there is nestled a fifth required book for this class: Girl Meets God, by Lauren F. Winner. I've read it before; see, she's come to our writer's series a few times, each time sporting jeweled cat-eyes and long velour skirts and a throaty voice, more accustomed to reading than speaking. Each time I've read through this book, though, it's been in a hurried pace, desperate to know enough about Lauren F. Winner that I wouldn't be completely speechless when comparing notes with other bibliophiles attending the series.

For this class though, beside my senior counterparts--self-identified smarty pants and literature fiends, a quick read-though will not be sufficient. For that I'm glad.

I finished the book the other night, curled in a thrift store armchair in a friend's room. As the inches in my left hand began accumulating and the pages in my right decreasing, I felt the tears begin to smart in my eyes. I didn't want to finish it. Here, in this book, I was finding a friend finally. Madeleine L'engle is the only other writer with whom I identify so strongly, and she hasn't turned out a new book in quite a long time. Here, Lauren F. Winner, with her talk of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments and the Book of Ruth and her propensity to sin and the stacks of books she has piled in every room of her Manhattan apartment, here is a person I can like and admire.

And so when the last pages were turned, I refused to close the book, but went back and reread favorite parts; small pieces of the whole, enough to convince me that good writing still happens to people who love God. And so this is how I usher in this next season of my life, finishing school and stepping out into the big, bad, corporate world, by stepping back and continuing to learn.