Let me begin by reading a few concise sentences about the human self that does the writing from a wonderful collection called, Conversations with Walker Percy (1971, p. 49). “Of course, the point of my book” (Love in the Ruins), Percy writes, is that the quest for the self is probably self-defeating. I mean if religion has any validity at all, then the quest for the self is nonsense, you know. It’s the quest for God, or as Kierkegaard, I think, said: the only way the self can