It used to be that when people would find out I'm a former Mormon, they'd ask me whether or not I watch Big Love and how closely it matches my experience of growing up in Utah. (Answers: "Yes" and "Not much.") Over the past year, though, that has changed. Now they ask whether or not I've seen The Book of Mormon.

The answer to that is yes. In fact, as soon as the Broadway production was announced, Laura and I started making plans to visit New York and see it. With my background, how could we not? We put together a group of friends that included my agent and got tickets for April 9th, about two weeks after the show's official opening. I bought our tickets early enough that it wasn't hard to get seats for a group of eight on our preferred date. But by the time we actually saw it, the hype had revved up to such a wild extent that people were asking us how on earth we'd managed to score tickets.

The Book of Mormon—from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Avenue Q co-creator Robert Lopez—was the most celebrated new musical of the 2011 Broadway season, and it's easy to see why. It has everything an audience in search of some dangerous New York City titillation could ask for—dirty words, blasphemy, violence, Mormons, sexual innuendo, frequently all crammed together into catchy production numbers—all consumable from the relative safety of a plush theater seat. It's been a giant hit with crowds and critics alike, landing nine Tony Awards (including Best Musical), five Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Musical), and who knows how many best-stuff-of-the-year lists. It kicks off a national tour this August, and a Chicago production will take up residence in the Bank of America Theatre this December. People are falling all over themselves to tell you how good it is.

Is it really that good? I don't think so. Did I enjoy it? Yes, to an extent. Was it funny? Yes, to an extent. Was it anything like my experience as a missionary? Yes—but to a very small, almost irrelevant extent.

The Book of Mormon tells the story of Kevin Price (Andrew Rannells), a Mormon youth who dreams of serving as a missionary in Orlando, Florida. Instead, he gets assigned to Uganda with Arnold Cunningham (an irrepressible Josh Gad) as his companion. Elder Cunningham is just about the biggest screw-up ever to pass through the Missionary Training Center, and Elder Price tries to put the best face on both disappointing assignments.

But Uganda turns out to be even more hellish than he could have imagined. The more experienced, longer-serving missionaries have not managed to convert a single soul in that war-ravaged land. Poverty and famine reign supreme. AIDS is rampant, its spread only exacerbated by the belief that it can be cured by having sex with a virgin (which spawns a surfeit of baby-rape jokes). A local warlord rules with a bloody iron fist. And the villagers get through their days by cursing God in no uncertain terms from behind philosophical grins.

Elder Price, depressed, does his best to preach the gospel according to Joseph Smith, but throws in the towel after the warlord, General Butt-Fucking Naked (Brian Tyree Henry), murders a man in front of him. It falls to Elder Cunningham to take over the proselytizing effort. But the well-meaning Cunningham, who didn't pay very close attention in class at the MTC, has never actually read the Book of Mormon, which forces him to invent gospel stories more tailored to the realities of life in Uganda.

The Book of Mormon is, above all else, funny—side-splittingly funny through a couple of long stretches. Okay, I'll say it. I think my first viewing of the South Park movie in a crowded theater was the last time I laughed as hard as I did right up through the show-stopping musical number "Hasa Diga Eebowai," an incredibly profane and blasphemous riff on sunny, reductive ditties like The Lion King's "Hakuna Matata." (On the off-chance you've been living in a cloister for the past twelve months and don't know the translation of "hasa diga eebowai," I won't spoil it for you.)

The songs are mostly terrific too, certainly up to the standards of the past twenty years of Broadway musicals. The production numbers are tuneful and funny, and there are even good laughs to had in the quieter numbers. (A particular favorite of mine is "Baptize Me," a song that very cleverly casts a request for cleansing from sin into the mode of one of those syrupy R&B loss-of-virginity ballads.) And the performances are certainly spirited, especially Josh Gad's in the role of the hapless but well-meaning Elder Cunningham.

But the show suffers in other ways. From a dramatic standpoint, the story's through-line is fractured by the disappearance of Elder Price, the nominal protagonist, through large portions of the second act. (I know that Price's character is meant to skewer the trope of the Broadway hero whose naive confidence enables him to conquer the world, but that doesn't mean it works.) Characters behave in inconsistent ways that undermine the plot—the murderous General Butt-Fucking Naked, for example, who early on is unafraid to shoot an innocent villager in the head or to sodomize a missionary with a holy book, but in the end is cowed by inspirational stories. The violence itself plays more like a blatant attempt to shock than an organic element of the plot, as if a page from a Quentin Tarantino script had been pasted by accident into the book, and introduces an unwelcome tone of reality that sits at odds with the relative sweetness of the rest of the production.

All that is forgivable, but the worst sin The Book of Mormon commits is to grow boring through much of its middle. Somewhere on the way to the muddle that takes Elder Price out of the spotlight, the show just stops being clever. It never exactly stops being funny in a low-level way, but neither the plot nor the jokes rises above a certain bland level of predictability. Oh, so one of the older missionaries is a repressed homosexual? Yawn. So the naive young Nabulungi (Nikki M. James) imagines Salt Lake City as a magical wonderland where the warlords are kind and there's a Red Cross on every corner? Ho hum.

The show catches fire again toward the end, after the miraculous conversion of nearly the entire village catches the attention of the Mormon mission president, who comes to congratulate the local missionaries and is treated to a hilarious production number in which the villagers rehash all the mixed-up misconceptions Elder Cunningham has taught them about the Book of Mormon. Some of this material verges on the racist, but The Book of Mormon is ultimately saved, if not redeemed, by the villagers' innate understanding that they are not being taught literal truth but rather a series of parables intended to help them process and deal with the harsh realities of their daily existence.

This final message about religion's palliative effects in a grim world did enable me to leave the theater with a smile on my face, but I still can't shake my conviction that The Book of Mormon is hardly the flawless gem so many people seem to think it is. Still, I can't deny that I had a lot of fun watching it, and the funny parts are so funny that most theatergoers will probably forgive the parts that drag.

All right, so that's my review of the production itself. But how accurately does it reflect the realities of Mormonism, and of the lives of Mormon missionaries? Well ... not all that well.

Don't get me wrong. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done their research, at least into Mormon history and doctrine, as two rather funny numbers ("All American Prophet" and "I Believe") amply demonstrate. They've come a long way from the days of Orgazmo, their 1998 film about a Mormon missionary who becomes an accidental porn star, which was wall-to-wall stupid-funny but didn't have the glimmerings of a first clue about Mormon teachings or missionary life.

They had a much better handle on things Mormon by the time they made the infamous "All About Mormons" episode of South Park in 2003, which I gave high marks for the accuracy of its portrayal of the way the church presents its own history. But in the interim Parker and Stone have only somewhat improved their knowledge of the way missions work.

One of the things they get right, which matched my experience to a scary degree, is the crushing sense being exiled to a strange land for a period of time that seems so long it may as well be forever. They also nail the feeling of despair that comes from being saddled with a companion not of your choosing who doesn't share your same work ethic.

But the mechanics of missionary life they get mostly wrong. "Two by Two," for instance, the song in which the young elders at the Missionary Training Center get their assignments, makes for a fun production number, but is based on fantasy. In reality, missionaries learn where in the world they'll be send months before they report to the MTC. They also are not normally assigned to be companions with other greenies, and certainly aren't assigned to just one companion for the full duration of their missions. New missionaries get more experienced elders as their first companions in the field, and their companions rotate every two or three months. (I had over a dozen different companions myself over the course of my mission.) And no missionary would ever be allowed to leave the MTC with as non-existent a grasp of the basics of Mormon theology as Elder Cunningham demonstrates.

Most wrong of all, though, is Elder Price's desire to serve his mission in Orlando. I have no doubt that plenty of lazy young men, hoping for two cushy years, have no greater ambition than to serve an English-speaking mission in a subtropical tourist destination, but that in no way reflects the thinking of young Mormons with ambitions to set the world on fire with their preaching. No, the glory-seekers among us (myself included) hoped for the most difficult assignments in the most exotic locales imaginable. Central America. Southeast Asia. Communist Russia (which was rumored to soon be opening to missionaries at the time I was putting my application papers in). These were the places we wanted to go. An elder as ambitious as Price would have been beside himself to get a calling to Uganda.

But if it sounds like I'm calling out the creators of The Book of Mormon for sloppiness, I'm really not. The reality of Mormonism is almost incidental to the show, which is not actually about Mormonism. Instead Mormonism is a proxy for religion itself, a safe choice for giving adherents of other faiths room to distance themselves from any critiques leveled in the production, which really aren't very deep. I can't even call The Book of Mormon a black comedy because in the end it doesn't have the conviction of its meanness. It has no interest in skewering the religious impulse, or in pushing its ideas to any absurd dark extreme. It lands sunny-side up, and is satisfied with the status quo. This, despite the lip service to naughtiness and edginess, makes The Book of Mormon a supremely conservative production, and thus perfect for Broadway success.

If I had to sum my opinion up in one sentence, I say that The Book of Mormon, while quite funny and entertaining, did not offend me nearly enough.

Now that Christmas is over, let's talk about miracles.

Miracles have been on my mind since last week when I heard the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman whom the Vatican plans to canonize. The miracle that sealed her canonization was 5-year-old Jake Finkbonner's 2006 recovery from the flesh-eating bacterium Strep A. His chest, neck, face, and scalp were infected, but a Blessed Kateri relic and prayers to the long-dead woman supposedly halted the progress of the infection before it reached his eyes, brain, or heart.

Jake's recovery is wonderful, perhaps even remarkable, but is it a miracle? We tend to use the word miracle in two different senses without always making much of a distinction between them. Sometimes we mean an occurrence has come to pass that was simply quite unlikely. In this case, miracle is nothing more than a hyperbolic turn of phrase. But often we mean an occurrence that could only have come to pass through some kind of supernatural or divine intervention.

The miraculous waters are only muddied by the frequency with which the word gets tossed around in the news. A game-winning three-point shot from half-court at the buzzer and other impressive athletic feats get the same tag as the 10-year-old Dutch boy who survives a plane crash that kills all 103 other people on board.

But are any of these occurrences more than rhetorical miracles? We know that, under the right circumstances, some people can survive plane crashes. We know that, with the right combination of skill, training, and luck, improbable last-minute field goals can happen. We know that internal diseases can be halted or cured, even if we don't always understand the precise mechanisms that bring this about. These and other seeimingly remarkable occurrences are things that we learn through our experience in, observation of, and interaction with the world are, in fact, possible.

When we sit at the bedside of a cancer-afflicted loved one and pray for God to send a cure, we know that a cure really is possible. But imagine sitting at the bedside of a loved one whose leg has been severed in an accident. Would any of us pray to God for the leg to regrow or be restored without surgical intervention and seriously expect that prayer to be answered? No, because we know through our experience of the world that limbs do not spontaneously regenerate. We don't even think about the possibility that God would provide such a miracle.

Which is odd. Our expectation of what God can miraculously accomplish is confined entirely to the realm of the possible. What we know is flatly impossible doesn't even enter into our thinking.

A miracle would be 104 out of 104 passengers surviving a horrific plane crash without a scratch. A miracle would be a priest sticking someone's severed leg back to the stump and having it reattach itself. Surely these feats would not be beyond an omnipotent God who traffics in the otherwise impossible. But no, what we consider to be miracles really aren't, and what would be true miracles don't lie within the realms of our expectations or even our imaginations.

Even young Jake Finkbonner, cured by a miraculous relic, seems to have that innate understanding of what is actually possible and what isn't. He says he wants to help other kids when he grows up. Does that mean he wants to be a priest? A saint?

No. He says he wants to be a doctor.

Yesterday I mentioned a pub in Brooklyn called Mooney's, which sadly no longer exists. It was on Flatbush Avenue near Park Place, right around the corner from the apartment where I lived from 1995 to 2001. My 30th birthday party there was a very memorable occasion, but thinking about Mooney's reminded me of another funny memory from that place.

It was June of either 1997 or 1998, I can't be sure which. I don't usually watch much sports, but I was still a relatively recent transplant from Utah and the Jazz were playing the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. I made a habit of slipping out to Mooney's to have a few beers and watch the games.

Mooney's was a great bar and always drew an eclectic clientele. I got to know a few of the other patrons over the course of the series, simply because they were curious about why I was cheering so loudly for Utah. I had been noticing one other patron in particular, who seemed to know a lot of other folks in the bar. He looked like an Orthodox Jew, with a white dress shirt, black pants, prayer fringe, skullcap, thick beard, and side curls. He always had a lit cigarette in one hand and a pint of beer in the other, and as he watched the games he was more vociferous and profane in his cheering than just about anyone else in the place. He looked to be about my age, and was the biggest bundle of contradictions I think I'd ever seen.

One night late in the series, I was sitting by myself at a high table opposite the bar when this fellow came weaving my way. "Hey," he said to me over the din, jabbing his cigarette at me. "I just heard from some people that you're a Mormon. From Utah."

I shrugged, sipping my Guinness apprehensively. "Yeah, I guess that's true."

"Man," he said, shaking his head, "that is so fucking weird." And he weaved his way back to the bar for another beer.

They finally caught up with me. It was bound to happen eventually.

It was Sunday evening. Laura and I had only been back home for a couple of hours after a long weekend in New York City. The doorbell rang. We had placed an order for Indian food only about twenty minutes earlier, so I grabbed a fistful of the cash I'd left on the sideboard and went down to answer the door.

It wasn't our food delivery. It was a pair of well-scrubbed young men wearing dark suits and black name tags. Yep, it was the Mormon missionaries.

"Hi, I'm Elder McAlister, and this is my companion Elder Nielsen," said the first. "We're looking for Donald Shunn?"

I had a choice to make. I wasn't going to be lame and deny who I was, but I did need to decide how nice I was going to be and to what extent I would engage with them. On the one hand, I was annoyed that someone (probably but not necessarily a member of my family) had given the Church my latest address, so my name now appeared on the rolls of the local LDS ward. On the other hand, these two kids were only doing what the Church had programmed them to do, and twenty-five years ago you would have found me doing exactly the same thing. On the other other hand, I had long pictured this moment and seen myself having an open, honest discussion with missionaries about my beliefs. Thanks to my excellent agent Joe Monti, my mission memoir is currently out on submission with some major book editors, so it was high time I started getting some practice talking frankly and without rancor with people of opposing beliefs.

"That's me," I said, shaking hands with both of them. "But I go by Bill."

"Well," said Elder McAlister, "we're just going around visiting with ward members who haven't been out to church for a while, wanting to see how you're doing. We wondered if there was a time when we could come visit with you."

"I'd be happy to talk with you some time," I said. "I have to be honest with you though, I haven't been active in the Church for well over fifteen years, and in fact I actively disbelieve in it. But I don't mind talking."

I gave them my phone number and told them I remembered what it was like to be where they were standing. They seemed surprised that I'd been a missionary. I asked them where they were from, and they asked me where else I'd lived and what had brought me to Chicago. I told them I was a writer, and that in fact I'd just finished work on a book about being a missionary. It was a quick leap from there to a brief telling of my bomb threat story, which seemed to blow their minds. Elder Nielsen was surprised to learn that, after being kicked out of Canada, I had served for a couple of months in the town he was from, Yakima, Washington. All in all, I managed to keep the kneejerk hostility the Church still brings out in me under control and (I hope) out of my voice. They were nice kids, though they clearly didn't know quite what to make of me.

I didn't ever invite them inside, because Laura was getting some work done and we had dinner on the way. But I probably stood out on the porch talking with them for ten minutes or so. I wonder if they'll call to make a return appointment. If they do, I hope I don't make them too uncomfortable when they come back. I think a frank discussion would be a good learning experience for all of us.

Woman in burqa
Pushing her grocery cart
Texting on her phone

Today my father would have been 75 years old, had he not succumbed to complications from prostate cancer nearly three years ago. I want to post something about the old man, but the closest thing I have to a remembrance at hand is the second chapter from the latest in-progress revision of my memoir. It's not exactly complimentary on the whole, but it does attempt to trace the trials my father went through trying to secure a better future for his family, which I believe he succeeded at—even if he died doubting it.

By the way, I was in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago and I hunted down the house in Highland Park where we lived until I was six. My mother had warned me that I really didn't want to visit that neighborhood, but since when have I ever listened to my parents' advice? Anyway, the neighborhood was just fine—quiet, even. The house, perched on hill on Aldama Street between Avenues 53 and 54, was much, much smaller than I remembered. And there were parrots squawking in a tall tree overhead.

I didn't know what to say. This was something I'd never been asked before, at least not in a way that betrayed any genuine interest in how I felt. I must have fielded that stock question hundred of times growing up, from relatives, family friends, and people at church, and the expected yes was always my reflexive answer. But the look on my father's face told me this time was different.

I'd been raised to believe that, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, missionary work was my duty. One of the earliest songs I learned in Sunday school was "I Hope They Call Me on a Mission," and most weeks two living exemplars of that sentiment showed up for church services at our Los Angeles meetinghouse. I adulated those missionaries—clean-cut young men dressed in white shirts, ties, and black name tags whose job was to go around teaching people about God—even if my understanding of their day-to-day lives was vague. My parents sometimes invited them over to our house for dinner. After the elders had shoveled up all the food in sight, we'd retire to the living room where they'd set up a flannel board and practice teaching the story of Joseph Smith's First Vision. The cutout figures enraptured my sisters and me. Telling gospel stories with a flannel board—that's what I wanted to do when I grew up. Preferably in Germany, like my father had when he was younger.

I knew that missionaries were supposed to teach people about the Church, but at the age of five I didn't fully appreciate what the lifestyle entailed. In fact, I had no firm grasp on the distinction between faiths other than our own. In the car, I would sometimes point to a church and ask what it was, or why it had a lowercase t on the top of its steeple. "They worship the devil there," my father would say, which did little to set me straight (and for many years caused me to find the sight of a cross unsettling).

It was with some confusion, then, that I began attending kindergarten in 1972 at Good Shepherd Lutheran School. An affordable alternative to public school in our largely Latino neighborhood of Highland Park, Good Shepherd is where I first smacked heads with a competing religious philosophy. I was a good student in most respects but drove my poor young teacher crazy with my frequent contradictions of her morning gospel lessons. Once for show-and-tell I proudly brought the German edition of the Book of Mormon my father had carried as a missionary. I couldn't understand the puzzled looks Das Buch Mormon drew until Miss Rasch attempted to make clear that not all faiths use the same sacred texts.

The realization that I shared a Bible but not much else with my Lutheran classmates blew my little mind. I had already acquired the bad habit of lying awake in the dark, trying to wrap my mind around the concept of an infinite universe, turning the puzzle of God's origin over and over, and basically making myself feel so insignificant I scared myself silly. To this volatile stew I added the question of what would have happened had my wisp of a spirit been sent down from heaven to a Lutheran family instead of my good Mormon parents. Presumably I'd have ended up slurping down false doctrine and believing it correct, hellbound and knowing no better. Was it only the luck of the draw that I'd landed in an enlightened home? The randomness implied by that near miss terrified me to my bones.

Mixed messages defined those early childhood years. My father—an industrial-arts teacher pursuing a doctorate in education at UCLA—filled our shelves with cast-off math and science books from his school library. Disneyland trips were interspersed with visits to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Yet my father insisted, despite what I read in those books and learned from planetarium shows, that my beloved dinosaurs had never existed, and that the earth was a mere six thousand years old. His firm pronouncement on the subject of cavemen—no such thing!—made me feel profoundly sinful as I sneaked peeks at the Neanderthal skulls in my book on early man.

Late in 1973, when I was six, we moved to the first of a series of small towns in northern Utah. My parents enrolled me a grade ahead in school, where in a strange version of culture shock I was startled to find that the kids at school were the same as the kids at church. And uniformly white.

My father had landed a job teaching at Grantsville High School, his next stepping-stone toward a principalship or better. He couldn't have been more proud of—nor, I'm sure, hopeful about—the Dr. Shunn nameplate on the door to his wood-and-metal shop. Born in 1936, the fifth of six children, he had dragged himself up from his poor Los Angeles roots through hard work, stubbornness, and a big assist from mentors in the local Mormon leadership. Though exposed to the Church by his mother as a child, he hadn't thrown himself into it until early adulthood, after his parents had both passed away. He credited the Church, through those mentors, with saving his life, and it became his one sure lodestone. Between a stint in the Army, missionary service in Germany, and teaching gigs in both L.A. and Salt Lake City, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Brigham Young University. His doctorate, the culmination of a decade and a half of struggle, school, interruptions, and endless side jobs, was going to be the ticket for him and his growing young family into security and respectability.

My father and I shared a close bond when I was small. I was named after him—my birth certificate reads Donald William Shunn II—though where people called him Don, I was Bill. That was the name of a uncle favorite of his, and what he wished he'd been called. As firstborn son, I occupied a special place in the family hierarchy, a position of privilege. My favorite of the German phrases he taught me, in fact, was good for little else than asserting that position: "Ich bin der Erste" ("I am the first"). I had always loved tagging along with him around L.A., no matter how prosaic the errand, and meeting the colorful characters he always seemed to know so well. Once, at Rudy's Barber Shop, I insisted on having my hair cut just like his—and he was nearly bald on top.

But in Utah that bond began to fracture. My father had a severe temper. Most infractions, real or imagined, merited spankings, but the serious ones earned a date with his leather belt, in the worst cases administered full-force to a bare bottom. The mere threat of the belt was enough to send my sisters and me into spasms of begging and sobbing. I got the belt for walking the wrong route home from school, for repeating novel words I'd heard from classmates. I remember getting an erection once while trying to pee, and the terror of attempting to hide the fact when my father blundered onto the scene. It wasn't what it looked like, but that hardly mattered to the belt. I must have been seven or eight.

The arbitrary and often unearned punishments, the belittling corrections when I offered an answer or opinion he didn't like, the constant sense that I was doing something wrong, taught me to keep my mouth shut around him, and drove me to avoid him as much as was possible in the same house. This was not always difficult, as work and church took up so much of his time. His career was not working out for him the way he had hoped. Despite endless applications, he never landed the administrative position he believed his degrees and hard work should have earned him. He'd been turned down for jobs as far away as Guam, but he reserved a special bitterness for what he regarded as the culture of nepotism and Church favoritism in Utah schools.

My father was a Mormon, yes, but a California Mormon. He had left behind his personal, professional, and Church networks when he moved us to Utah, not to mention better pay and all his seniority. He could never make friends who might advance his career, and in fact often shot himself in the foot with his inability to keep quiet about what he saw as the stupidity and graft above. He almost always had another job on the side, anything from janitorial to construction work. National Guard duty claimed one weekend a month, and he even spent a few summers away in Los Angeles at an old job, driving a bread-delivery truck. I loved those summers, if for nothing else than the mental breathing room they offered.

Except at the highest levels, a lay clergy runs the LDS Church. Leaders rotate, called from the local congregations, or "wards," and fitting their duties around full-time jobs. My father held several different positions in the wards where we lived, including, for a time, that of counselor to the bishop. My father probably held as many poor opinions of local leaders as he did of school administrators, but it never swayed his zeal for the Church itself, which he insisted was perfect in design. If he pushed any two ideals as keys to success in life, they were higher education and devotion to the Church—missionary service being a key component of the second.

Since the beginnings of the Church, Mormons have dispatched missionaries to all corners of the globe to spread their message of the restoration of the important lost bits of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Young men are expected to serve when they turn nineteen, laboring for two years, at their own expense, in a destination not of their choosing. I was still in grade school when my father opened a savings account for that purpose in my name. When I was fourteen, he arranged a summer cabinetry job for me with the school district, building bookshelves and study carrels and the like, and he stuck my paychecks straight into the bank. Occasionally I pulled some money out to have a little fun with, but that felt like stealing from the Lord, like embezzling consecrated funds.

As a child I'd looked forward to the adventure of a mission, dreaming of the exotic lands I might visit, but as I grew older I'd begun to resent and even dread the coming two-year imposition. A missionary's time was not his own. He couldn't watch TV or movies, couldn't read newspapers, magazines, or any but a handful of approved books, couldn't work on personal projects of any kind. My love for math, paleontology, astronomy, and reading had led me inevitably to the science fiction section of the library, where I discovered a deep and abiding passion for pulpy adventures in space and time. I read voraciously and always had stories or novels of my own in progress. My junior year of high school, when I was fifteen, I started submitting to magazines in a serious attempt to get published. Two years without a novel to read, two years without a pen and notebook, was as awful a prospect as two years without a hand. The only real upside I could see to a mission was the possibility of gaining fluency in some useful foreign language, but there was no guarantee I'd do my time in a non-English-speaking mission. The Church would send me where it needed me, not where I might want to go.

I daydreamed about skipping out on a mission, but I knew that would never fly in my family. The flip side of firstborn privilege is that I was expected to set an example of probity and obedience for my younger siblings, who numbered seven by the time my parents decided to retire from procreation. Besides, if I revealed my natural reluctance, not only would I shame myself before my family, I'd shame my family before the community. Because I was a good student of the scriptures and could speak well from the pulpit, I was regarded at church as a spiritual wunderkind, possibly a future bishop or better. For Bill Shunn not to serve a mission would be a scandal of Biblical proportions. My parents wouldn't be ostracized at all, but they would have to face the congregation's pity every week, and the knowledge in their own hearts that they'd failed in the matter of my spiritual upbringing. Perhaps more importantly, it would damage my chances of someday finding my perfect Mormon wife. The Church cautioned young LDS women of marriageable age, with their blue eyes and rosy cheeks, to avoid serious relationships or even dates with men who had not served missions.

With all those factors stewing in my brain, my reluctance to serve made me feel wicked, ungrateful, hypocritical. I kept it all to myself and never breathed a word of it. I didn't even confide my secret to my few close non-Mormon friends, who thought throwing two years away was stupid. I defended mission service to them when we talked about it, in fact. How could they give me clear advice on what to do when they didn't share the beliefs that caused me the problem in the first place? The only course I could see was to pray to God to change my heart so I could find the joy in doing what I knew was right.

I graduated from high school in 1984, still a couple of months shy of seventeen. My family had settled in a town called Kaysville—part Main Street USA, part suburban tract housing, part shrinking farmland. I had in hand a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to the University of Utah, our fair state's suspect bastion of liberal thought. I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and that somewhere was my resolve never to attend BYU. I could do a two-year stretch in the mission field, but the idea of an education from a school where religion classes were core curriculum, social success was measured in terms of marriage, and students were forbidden to wear their Top-Siders without socks was beyond the pale. My parents were devastated that the "Y," their beloved alma mater, was not among the half-dozen schools I applied to, but they eventually accepted my choice of the "U" less because of the scholarship than because I could live at home and commute the twenty miles to Salt Lake City.

That first year of college was a difficult one for me, as the oldest of my high school friends began leaving on their missions. With so long left until mine, nearly four years would pass before I saw some of them again. Still, I could feel the clock ticking.

One long weekend that fall, my father and I took a road trip to California together. This was not unusual. My father loved long drives, and he'd make the run to L.A., where crash space with relatives was plentiful, on the flimsiest pretext. He preferred back roads, maybe because they reminded him of his early student days when he could do the route home from Provo in his Corvette convertible in ten hours or less. He also required company on his trips, which is how I had come to know the roads between Kaysville and Los Angeles as well as the route to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Which is to say, I could do it with my eyes closed, and frequently did.

As hard as I'd tried to wriggle out of this trip, there I was riding shotgun, lodged deep in the uncomfortable silence that always reigned when my father and I were alone together. I liked seeing my L.A. cousins; the getting there and back was the painful part.

So when my father broke the silence to ask, so piercingly, if I wanted to serve a mission, my first instinct was to throw myself out the car door and take my chances in the gray desert. I had recently learned about a six-week summer workshop in science fiction writing at Michigan State University, and I wanted to apply. I'd have to use some of the money from my mission fund to go, though, and I'd been trying to figure out how to broach the subject. But this was evidently the wrong time to tip him off to my real priorities.

Fearing that my father might see through an outright lie, I groped for a plausible evasion as the dusty landscape churned past my window. The words of Spencer W. Kimball, at the time the Mormon prophet, rang in my head: "Every young man should serve a mission. It is not an option; it is your obligation."

With what I hoped was a casual shrug, I said, "It's what I'm supposed to do."

"No, son," snarled my father. He hunched over the wheel of our old brown station wagon like he was gnawing his tongue off. His vehemence made me cringe, even though he hadn't laid a hand on me since I was ten or eleven. His eyes blazed blue as he turned them, bulging, toward me. "That's not how you should be thinking. This is a serious question. Do you want to go on a mission?"

My ears roared. My lungs burned. The reptile in me—firstborn, example, martyr—curled its scaly armor around the underbelly of my hidden self.

"Yes," I said. "That's what I want."

"Why?" he demanded.

Boys go on missions for a lot of different reasons. Some because their parents promise them a car or college tuition when they get home. Some at the insistence of their girlfriends, who would otherwise marry someone more devout—and often do, anyway. Some out of inertia, or boredom, or to put off other, more momentous life decisions. The path of least resistance.

I often heard it said at church that there are no wrong reasons to go on a mission, only wrong reasons to stay. But I needed a right reason. Though he rarely said much about his mission, I was sure that my father had gone for the right reason. In his day, missions lasted two and a half years—down from three years or four in even earlier times. You don't do that for a car.

"I want to serve God," I said, the words ashes in my mouth. "I want to spread the gospel, so other people can feel the same joy we know."

"It's a solemn responsibility," my father said, eyes narrowed. "Not to be undertaken lightly."

"I know."

He gazed balefully at me, then returned his attention to the road. "Okay, then."

A green milepost ticked past.

"The church is true, son," my father said, staring down the asphalt into the future or the past, his face painted with that jumble of cynicism, grief, and resolve I had learned to recognize as solemnity. "If it weren't, the missionaries would have destroyed it a long time ago."

I usually chuckled at this adage, as if it made entire sense to me. But this time it didn't sound funny.

This morning,
with a high of seventy degrees in the forecast,
amazing for a November in Chicago,
I drove the dog to Warren Park.
That's where we go for a special treat
instead of our usual neighborhood walk,
because the squirrel chasing is most excellent,
and there are never any cops there to harass you,
a scofflaw walking his dog off its leash.

We like to run up the steps of the sledding hill,
which a parks department sign actually proclaims "Sledding Hill,"
and then charge down the slope,
after which we make our way around the skirt of the hill
where the squirrels rummage through the leaves
like so many bargain hunters.
We crunch crunch crunch across the orange carpet,
and if we're lucky we spot a squirrel far enough out
in the open that Ella can chase it full-bore
back to its tree.
She has never once caught one.
Or at any rate never killed one.

Next we like to follow the cinder jogging path
all the way around the little nine-hole golf course embedded
like an off-center yolk
in the albumen of the park,
and that's exactly what we did this morning.
I walked in the leaves at the side of the path,
trying to encourage Ella to do the same,
but unless she has a rodent, lagomorph or marsupial in her sights
she prefers to walk on pavement. Go figure.

We were on the south side of the golf course,
the tall chain-link fence meant to protect us from flying balls
off to our left,
when I saw two men coming our way along the path,
youngish men—younger than I, at any rate—
neatly bearded men dressed in long robes the color of wet sand.
It was already warm enough out that I was regretting
the heavy coat I wore over my hooded sweatshirt.
I snapped my fingers imperiously,
calling for Ella to return to my side,
to leave the path and get out of the way
of the two youngish men engaged in animated talk.

Ella is a good dog, shaggy-bearded herself,
and she mostly listens. But I know that Muslims
are afraid of dogs, or wary, or I think I know this,
having watched many women in headscarves
whisper urgently to their children to stay out
of our path. At least,
I assumed these men were Muslims. I admit I don't know
the taxonomy of robes and caps and beards.
They could have been Coptic Christians or even Jains for all I knew.
At any rate, they didn't have turbans on
so I knew they weren't Sikhs.
But despite my commands, Ella didn't leave the path
entirely. She shifted toward me, trotting along
the very edge of the pavement, but didn't leave it altogether.
"Ella," I hissed. "Come." She spared me only a sidelong glance,
certain she had already obeyed me to the extent required.
Letter of the law.
I only wanted to be a good neighbor.
The men were yards away.
Dogs are not consistent with Islam.
I braced for whatever.

It's not that I thought anything worse
than embarrassment might transpire,
but my dog does have a history.
She grew up in Queens, and she still has some of that attitude.
We socialized her with people pretty quickly,
my wife and I, but that didn't prevent her from
barking her selectively bred head off at any unfamiliar creatures
we encountered on the street,
ones with strange colors, shapes or motions.
Woman in full burqas, like shambling mounds of midnight.
People in big hats.
People on crutches or in wheelchairs.
Black people--a sad reflection of the diversity
of visitors to our apartment.
The worst was the time she lost it at an old black woman
in a wheelchair
in front of a funeral parlor
on Astoria Boulevard near the elevated tracks.
As we dragged her in a wide, apologetic berth
as far from the frightened woman
as possible.
As the woman's decked-out younger companions yelled at us.
As if we'd trained our dog to hate old black women in wheelchairs.
That was the worst.

But it's not as if Ella has never met a Muslim man before.
We used to walk her up Steinway Street in Queens,
right past all the Middle Eastern restaurants and pastry shops
and bookstores, and the men's social clubs with the curvy hookahs,
and even past the mosque.
Some people avoided us, though we never walked her
up the middle of the sidewalk or in such a way
as to block anyone's path.
We didn't mean it as a provocation
but more as a statement, an exercise of our rights
to free association, an exercise in multiculturalism.
And not everyone avoided us. One time
a group of three thirtyish Egyptians stopped us
as we walked Ella up the far edge of the sidewalk.
One of them with a reedy mustache and a look of childlike wonder
asked if our dog was friendly. "Yes," we said.
He asked if he could pet her. "Of course," we said.
We made her sit.
Ella could care less about most strangers, but she doesn't like
surprises, so we told the man to reach out slowly.
His fingertips barely grazed the hair on the top of her head,
while Ella sat patiently and yawned.
"Good dog," we said, while the man straightened up
with a smile as wide as the world on his face.
You could see him already composing the story in his head
that he would tell his friends,
about how he petted a dog
and didn't even get struck by lightning.
He'll be dining out on that one for years.

We loved that neighborhood for reasons like that meeting
on the street. We loved it for our friend Ali,
who would never touch Ella because he was cooking
in his little restaurant, but who always had a kind word for her,
and still asks about her when we visit.
I love it for the times I stayed out all night drinking
with Ali, who knew everyone, for the times he Virgiled me
into the social club across the street from his restaurant,
where I smoked shisha with the Egyptian men and listened
to monologues on history and hieroglyphics,
on all the important things that Egypt invented, or did first.
Our travels in Cairo and Luxor and Petra and Amman,
talking Islam and politics and Christianity
with virtual strangers in coffee shops and cafés,
sometimes seemed the inevitable endpoint of our years
in that neighborhood, which we loved.

What I'm trying to get at is, I don't hate Muslims,
and I especially don't want any Muslim to think I hate Muslims,
or that my dog hates Muslims.
Which she doesn't.
The two men on the path had nearly drawn even with us,
and Ella still hadn't moved off the pavement.
But there was enough room for her and the nearest man to pass
each other without touching, which they did.
"Good morning, sir," he said to me with a cheerful trill,
his face like a gibbous moon, beaming.
"Good morning, how are you today?" I said with a smile
as wide as Lake Michigan,
a smile trying a little too hard,
wanting to be seen as a friend, not a fraud,
and reflect the genuine shiver of camaraderie I felt.
"Very well, thank you," he said, dipping his head.
He, the respectful, non-threatening immigrant,
me, the welcoming, tolerant native,
both playing the part of open-minded, ideal world citizen.
Maybe he was born here, I don't know, and maybe I was not,
as far as he knew.
No matter.
We both still played our proper roles—
roles still, even if based on a true story,
inspired by real events.
I might wish for a deeper connection,
a meeting of the minds,
but at least we all passed on our leisurely errands
without baring our teeth,
without drawing our guns,
and I can live with that.

Ella, more alien than us all,
paid none of our human posturing the slightest mind.

It's easy to see why Drafthouse Films (the new distribution arm of Austin's great Alamo Drafthouse theater chain) was able to snap up the rights to British TV vet Chris Morris's feature film debut, Four Lions. Probably no one else wanted to touch it. It's not a movie for everybody.

I saw Four Lions last night at a preview screening at Piper's Alley, and I thought it was the funniest movie I'd seen since, well, The Hangover. Like any number of other comedies, it's the story of a buffoonish group of losers determined to succeed at something they clearly have no talent for. What makes Four Lions different is that the something is jihad. Will you like it? That depends on how much taste you have for laughing at suicide bombings. (Mild spoilers may lie ahead.)

Omar and Waj are two would-be British-Pakistani mujahideen who get ejected from an Al Qaeda training camp for rank incompetence. Undeterred from their dreams of glorious martyrdom, they tell the rest of their goofy terror cell back home in England that they've been sent back to carry out an important mission. The antics of the group, the most volatile member of which is a loose-cannon white convert to Islam, as they bumble their way toward a series of suicide bombings are very funny stuff, laugh-out-loud stuff. But you can't help but feel a certain amount of discomfort laughing at this gang of sincere fools.

Are we laughing at stereotyped Muslims? I don't think so. We're laughing at comedic types, certainly, but as embodied by characters who are actually more three-dimensional than you might expect in this sort of movie. Along with the uncomfortable laughs, we get a look inside the rage, the faith, the yearning for community, and the yearning for glory that prods a certain type of personality into taking up a violent cause. And the self-styled jihadis are hardly the only Muslims we meet. In the course of the film we encounter a wide range of Muslims, most of whom want nothing to do with violence, and a few of whom get caught up in it anyway, in different ways.

I guess a movie like Four Lions has to be approached in two ways. First, does it just plain work as a movie? I'll get back to that question, because I want to tackle the second question first: Is it wrong to make a comedy about Muslim terrorists at a time when anti-Muslim sentiment is already running at such a fever pitch?

I think the answer to this question is no. If this were an anti-Muslim film, then I might give a different answer. But the comedy, the bumbling antics, as discomfiting as they may be, use familiar types and tropes to draw us into an unfamiliar milieu. And when things start to go pear-shaped for the conspirators, we realize we've come to sympathize with these characters, and that we're emotionally invested in their fates. Despite the death and mayhem (and make no mistake, this is a black comedy, one in which Western law enforcement is just as confused, jumpy, and mistake-prone as the terrorists), that may be the most subversive aspect of the movie—sympathy for the devils. If this movie is anti-anything, it's anti-stupidity, and sadly there's plenty of that commodity to go around.

So does it work as a movie. Yes. I found the humor a little uneven, especially toward the beginning, before I'd assimilated the rhythm of the movie and its dialects. (Yes, the accents in Four Lions take some getting used to, and even later I had to strain to understand them at times. But don't let that scare you off.) Bottom line, this is a movie that only seems to treat a serious subject cavalierly. As a comedy, side-splitting and jaw-dropping as hell, it allows you to hope that everything might turn out well in the end. But as a story of would-be martyrs, you have to ask yourself, "Turns out well for whom?"

It's a measure of the power of Four Lions that it ultimately can't be slotted easily into either set of expectations.

[Four Lions, already playing in a few cities, opens tomorrow in San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Katy, Duluth, Asheville, and Somerville. Go see it. You'll have a great time, insha'Allah. And boy, will you ever have something to talk to your date about afterwards.]

I watched Paranormal Activity yesterday evening on DVD while waiting for Laura to get home from work. I found the movie deeply, thrillingly, and realistically frightening—not because I believe in ghosts or demons, but because it returned me to a time in my life when I did.

Between the ages of ten and sixteen or so, I experienced a few episodes of what I realize now must have been sleep paralysis. This occurs when the brain rouses from REM sleep but the body essentially remains asleep. You're fully awake and aware, but you can't move a muscle.

That's exactly what happened to me maybe half a dozen times that I remember. I would wake up in the darkness of my bedroom unable to move, terrified by the certain convinction that the Devil himself was holding me immobile, and that he was going to kill me. I would struggle to move for what seemed like an hour, to no avail. I would struggle to form words, to shout for help, also to no avail. I would struggle not to fall back to sleep, because I knew if I fell asleep I would die. I would silently pray to God for deliverance from my assailant, deliverance that only came when I did fall back into unwilling unconsciousness.

On one very memorable occasion, when I was an older teenager, this happened on a visit to my uncle's house in Los Angeles, while I was cocooned in sleeping bag on his living room floor. My father was in a sleeping bag not six feet away, but I couldn't make the tiniest peep to wake him up so he could save me.

I've never talked about this with anyone, so I know that any conclusions I drew about what was going on with these night episodes were completely mine. And the conclusion I drew was that I had somehow, through bad actions and thoughts, opened myself up to the power of evil. (It also did not help that an episode in Mormon mythology has Joseph Smith overwhelmed and held immobile by Satan while he prays to God to learn which church he should join. In a strange way, I convinced myself that Satan would not bother with me unless I had some fantastic destiny to fulfill. And that scared me too.)

The comforting thing I discovered many, many years later, after reading about sleep paralysis, is that my experience was normal for sufferers of this disorder. The paralysis is usually accompanied by panic and a sense of severe threat, and many, many people sense the illusion of a threatening presence during episodes. I'm far from the only person to wake up believing a demon or devil is holding them captive.

Which leads me back to Paranormal Activity. The movie is not about sleep paralysis, but it is about a demon haunting. The build-up of eerie events takes place slowly and with excruciating restraint, which resulted in me hugging my knees on the couch and at moments clambering backward in fright. I think it was probably much more effective playing in a darkened living room that it would have been in a movie theater, at least for me.

But as freaked out as the movie made me, it also left me feeling exhilarated. There was the joy of seeing skilled moviemaking play out, yes, but there was also the shivery return to an age when I truly believed I had brought demons into my home—tempered by the realization that at the end of the movie I could safely return to the reality in which demons are nothing more than a story for scaring gullible children (and adults).

Laura came home before the movie was over, and I gushingly enthused to her about how to the movie was affecting me. Then we went to bed, and I slept like a baby.

Having watched Valkyrie recently, I've been thinking about the intersection of art, commerce and religion. I know, that's probably not the kind of discussion the filmmakers intended to provoke, but here we are. Germany started it.

Every so often a big kerfluffle flares up in the media or the blogosphere about what famous entertainer is or isn't a Scientologist, and why. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Isaac Hayes, Beck, Chick Corea, Edgar Winter, Chaka Khan, Mark Isham, Greta Van Susteren—we're supposed to avoid giving them money so we don't inadvertently support their reprehensible "church." Leonard Cohen, Paul Haggis, Jerry Seinfeld, Courtney Love, Gloria Gaynor—once were Scientologists, but now they're on the okay list. Neil Gaiman—wait, what's the controversy with him? I'm not supposed to read him because his relatives are Scientologists?

Frankly, keeping score like this is ridiculous.

As much as I dislike Scientology, discriminating against artists because of their private beliefs is a losing game. I hate the fact that there were Crusades, and a Spanish Inquisition, and institutional coverups of child sexual abuse, but that doesn't mean I'm going to deny myself the work of Catholic writers like Graham Greene or Tim Powers, or Catholic filmmakers like Kevin Smith. Will some of the money I pay for their stuff end up in Vatican coffers? Possibly, but I'm not naive enough to think that any of the money I give or receive is pure. We live in a pluralist society. We can't help the fact that our money is going to circulate through parts of the body politic that we don't like. The only judgment we can really make is how we respond to the art, how pure and universal and human it is, how ennobling or demeaning or thrilling or dull, how free from or full of agenda or polemic.

And let's face it, Scientology is no more ridiculous on the face of it than Catholicism or Zoroastrianism or Islam or Greek mythology. The claims of these other religions are just as extraordinary. The only difference is that the origins of the rest are shrouded in antiquity—as if mere age confers some kind of stature or holiness or untouchability. In historical terms, Mormonism is nearly as recent as Scientology, and in cosmological terms makes claims every bit as grand and silly, but how many of you Wheel of Time readers are going to boycott the new volume just because Brandon Sanderson wrote it?

The value of the work is in the work itself. If the work makes your life better or more pleasant, support it. Pay for it. It's that simple. Clint Eastwood's a libertarian who supported McCain? So what. I love his movies. Beck and Chick Corea give money to L. Ron Hubbard's successors? Big deal. I get a lot more pleasure from their records than from most Cruise or Travolta movies—hell, than from most Mel Gibson movies or Orson Scott Card novels these days—so I'm happy to give them my money. I, an atheist, have given money to causes devoted to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States, but that mere fact hardly makes my fiction superior to or more worthy of support than a Catholic like Gene Wolfe's.

As for Neil Gaiman, I'd be an awful hypocrite to avoid his books just because his father was a big muckity-muck in the Church of Scientology. I myself am a direct descendant of Edward Partridge, the first Mormon bishop. No, I avoid Gaiman's books because I simply don't care for them.

Artists, like most people, are more than just the religions they profess. So get down off your high horse and give the poor Scientologists a chance. The rich ones, too, if they're your thing.