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Certainly I was a very religious child, a deeply weird and very emotional child, an only child with lots of imaginary friends and a very active imagination. I loved Sunday school and Bible camp and all that. I had my own white Bible with Jesus' words printed in red in the text; I even spoke at youth revivals.

I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.

As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.

My family took me to church when I was like 4 years old, and I had to be in a pageant, and I was playing Jesus.

I sang in choir as a kid.

I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects.

I was 16 when I got a scholarship to study classical composition at a conservatory. By that time I had already listened to Scottish folksong with my mother, sung in church choirs, and had sung solo with Benjamin Britten conducting.

It was when my children were 5, 3 and 10 months old that I just felt the desperate need to get to know God through the pages of my Bible. And as a result, I started a Bible class in my city for the primary purpose of being in it.

My childhood was limited to mostly gospel music. We didn't have, like, a lot of records in our house, you know. It was like my grandparents who raised me. They were pretty old-fashioned in their religious ways, so it was like church, church, church, school, school, school.