My hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan

I don't know if you know it or not, but both Professor Carpenter and I were born in Michigan in the United States. I was born in Grand Rapids, a small town in the southwest of the state. I moved away when I was young, before I started school in fact, and I've lived a lot of places (they say Americans are always on the go), Los Angeles mostly, but my birth is still registered in the Kent County Courthouse in Grand Rapids.



Grand Rapids is a very religious town. In fact, Wikipedia has a whole category about religion in Grand Rapids, rather than just a single page about it. When I was born my father taught at Aquinas College, a Catholic college in town run by the Dominicans, one of the three great intellectual orders of the Catholic Church.



Of course Grand Rapids is very modern now, and has changed a lot since I was born there, but there is still a lot of traditional Americana there.