he was terrified by his encounter with New York City. It was a difficult time, and Frei had trouble feeling that he belonged. The family were very short of money, and were only able to find him a scholarship to study textile engineering at North Carolina State University (after seeing an advertisement for it in a paper). He gained a Bachelor of Science degree there in 1942. Nevertheless, he took to his adopted country and made it thoroughly his own – so much so that when he went back to Germany for a visit in the 1950s he felt most definitely like a visiting American Professor rather than a German exile returned. In particular, he found a home within America in New Haven, Connecticut, at Yale University. Turning to theology While at North Carolina State, Frei heard a lecture by the prominent theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, began corresponding with him, and eventually enrolled for a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Yale Divinity School (YDS), Niebuhr's base. It was there that he found a kind of home. Despite some wanderings in the years between 1945 and 1947 and 1950 and 1956, Frei described YDS as the "world not left behind". There he was taught by Niebuhr and by R. L. Calhoun and Julian Hartt, and there some of his deepest theological attitudes were shaped, some of his deepest friendships formed, all his most important work done, and his tremendously successful teaching and administrative duties carried out. He graduated in 1945, and became a Baptist minister at the First Baptist Church, North Stratford, New Hampshire. Despite the work involved in the parish, in being a local preacher, and in some teaching work, Frei found time to read a great deal in solitude. He found himself drawn towards Anglicanism, towards what he saw as its more obviously 'generous' orthodoxy – to such an extent that in later life he was to say that Baptist ministry had always felt like a staging post on the way to somewhere else. At the same time, he developed a yearning for more academic work. Frei returned to the graduate school at Yale Divinity School in 1947, and began a lengthy doctoral dissertation under H. Richard Niebuhr, on Karl Barth's early doctrine of Revelation. This was to take until 1956 to complete – but some of that time is explained by the other things Frei was doing. On