And I have to say that all the "ew" and "Really really?" reactions here, and the total hideous ignorance on the Pew quiz, are weirdly cracking me up. It's such a central part of my identity and my messy love for the Church and my grim determination to hold on despite the rampant asshattery in the hierarchy, that it just makes me feel like an utter and complete freak even among all y'all and most definitely compared to the world at large.

My Ew was about Tales of the City, where a cult is taking amputated parts from the hospital and using them for communion. Not about transubstantiation, FTR.

it just makes me feel like an utter and complete freak even among all y'all

Yeah, but we love you for it.

Having been honked at by more than one driver for coming to a complete stop at a stop sign,

Ahhh, Massachusetts, where red lights and stop signs are suggestions, rather than laws.

and flipped off by someone going the wrong way down a one way street, I hold no fondness for MA drivers whatsoever.

A not-so-rare sighting of the MA state bird.

I can't remember if I ever had a European history class, much less what was taught in it.

Sophomore year! Sister Timothy! I remember it well.

I may have learned about Luther in European history, but I remember more from reading the play Luther in a high school English lit class.

Gah, Jesse, that's a total ew. I somehow completely blocked that part out from my memory of the series. Actually, I can't remember much of any of the plots, just the characters: Mona and Ms. Madrigal and Mouse and Mary Ann (I don't think I can ever re-read the last novel because of her).

Damn, but that's a lot of M's.

It was weird to read through it and think about exactly how I came to know the various items.

The quiz punked out for me after question #5, but I was thinking how everything I know about Judaism I learned from the All of a Kind Family books I read as a kid. I knew much more about Purim and the Sabbath than I did about what being Presbyterian was supposed to mean, in fact.

I knew about the Reformation in high school, also about transubstantiation, but mostly through my voracious reading of historical fiction.

In college, I definitely had classes that went into the Ref in depth (studying the Reformation introduced me to the concept of defenestration, a word and concept that tickles me to no end, that we have a specific word that refers to death by tossing one out a window) and then studying medieval lit and history...

Well, I know an awful lot about Catholicism, but my views are pretty damned...uh, medieval. I know tons from Roman times to the 19th century, and then it's all "many nuns took off their habits and no one uses Latin anymore, dammit."

I can thank fiction for my broad general knowledge of world religions, for the most part.

I somehow completely blocked that part out from my memory of the series.

What's funny about that is that it's an amnesia storyline! Good times.