story on the class appeared in The Washington Post, which attracted the attention of the local community. Schedler knew nothing of the Post report, and on the last evening of the course, seven Buddhist monks in saffron robes walked into the church classroom. Schedler went through a whole assortment of feelings, from defensiveness to embarrassment to attraction to what they were saying, finally regretting that he could not be like them: "Regret is an interesting emotion, combining as it does both wish and denial. Regret is about affirmation: 'I wish in my next life to be like you.' But this is so often impossible because of the way we are enculturated." While managing Christ Church parish youth events he met the woman who would eventually become his wife, Carol Skeels. Skeels, the daughter of Norman and Betty Skeels of Miami and a journalist, followed him back to St. Louis and took a job teaching English. They have three children: Karen, Ruth Anne, and David. In 1959, Schedler enrolled at Princeton University after seeing the school's announcement of a new and selective Religion and Philosophy Ph.D. program in the journal Religion and Life. Schedler intended to become a language philosopher, and he was enamored of Alfred North Whitehead, phenomenology, and existentialism. Paul Tillich's method of correlation became the major influence on his thinking. Schedler wrote his dissertation on the method of Austin Farrer and Ian Ramsey under religious scholar George F. Thomas at a time when the history of ideas approach to interpretation of texts characterized most of the faculty. While completing his thesis, Schedler accepted a call to ministry in the parish of Pilgrim Lutheran Church, Cheltenham, in the Philadelphia suburbs. "Once I was out of Princeton, I went into a parish right outside of Philadelphia. And I wanted to do that because mother church educated me and I felt I owed her. I wanted to teach in a church-related school where I could help young men and young women deal with the questions that I'm sure were coming up when they confronted Darwin and Freud and linguistic philosophy, and existentialism and all that." Schedler led worship services, but also did experimental things like bringing in advisors from all walks of life — lawyers, psychiatrists, doctors, and accountants — to help parishioners better negotiate their lives. He mounted theater performances in the chancel and also religious plays. Professional life Early