Every year around this time, from about the age of 7 until I was 21, older people asked me the same question: “So,” they’d say with a genial chuckle, “are you ready to go back to school?” 

I haven’t heard that question in about 39 years, but this week I heard it again for the first time in a long, long while. I have gone back to school — I am perhaps the world’s oldest graduate student, getting my Master’s of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary — and as September nears, I am feeling the old back-to-school itch to buy new pens, binders, and a giant Trapper Keeper notebook. I am also getting to hear some of the old questions.