It was such a relief to visit the Walsh family. They were blessedly ordinary, liberal-leaning Democrat-voting Roman Catholics.

Unlike my family, the Walsh children seemed to have lives independent of their father and mother. Genie's mother seemed pleased when her children made their own ways. The frantic talk about the Lord's leading, or the "direction of the work," and the constant wrangling and positioning between family members over what amounted to the family business - L'Abri - was absent. And my admiration for Genie's sensible family was one of the reasons that I began wondering if the ideas I'd grown up with were really the only good ideas to live by. The Walsh clan didn't believe what we believed, and yet they seemed to be doing just fine.

Not a coincidence. Excerpted from Crazy For God, page 250.