When I was a boy, religion in our home was tender to the touch, sometimes even raw. Our forays into organized religion were subject to fits and starts. My parents lost three of their six children and my father suffered from a debilitating ailment doctors could not diagnose for years. We lived on a farm, and it never (well, almost never) rained from the time I was six until I was twelve. As I watched my father's health decline, our crops and cattle suffer, and our financial predicament change from poor to desperate, I wondered what we had done to deserve such punish-ment. And were our...

They gather around a big table in the back of Prigmore's General Store and Cafe in downtown Riverby several times a week most weeks. There are six of them, five men and one woman. There may have been more or less in the past. There are no programs or speakers. Those outside The Circle wonder what they talk about, but they don't ask. The only requirement for membership is to have been deeply hurt or to have caused serious hurt to others. Tee Jessup is not a member of The Circle, but he qualifies. He spends a lot of time on the porch of a dilapidated farm house on a hill, feeling sorry for...