WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

John P. Crossley, 70, director of USC’s School of Religion, who specializes in 19th and 20th century theological ethics.

I started reading in early grade school and the thing that turned me on to reading was my mother’s taking me to the Oakland Public Library every week. I started out reading animal stories.

In high school, I started reading serious novels. I read in study hall all the time. They were usually stories of people doing entrepreneurial things. One book was about a guy who went into the business of blueberry growing. Another was about a guy who started out with a Model T truck, then got a Model A truck and, by the end of the book, owned several trucks. This was capitalistic propaganda, teaching kids to be entrepreneurial.

I also remember “Forever Amber� in high school. It wasn’t pornographic, but it was a sexy story about a young woman named Amber who experimented sexually a lot. It was definitely on the forbidden list, but everybody read it.

In college--that’s when I got interested in philosophy first. I started reading a lot of classic philosophy that I never read before. John Locke was very influential, and that took me to read Jonathan Edwards, who is famous for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.� But he wrote more than that. He wrote “The Nature of True Virtue,� a lovely book. And that’s when I realized that my own background, my own heritage, was a strange combination of Enlightenment philosophy, a la Locke, and Calvinistic theology. Edwards was the first person that I ever read who could put those things together harmoniously. So that’s when I decided to go to seminary.

I became a Presbyterian minister, and then I went to school for a PhD and continued to read theology and philosophy. On the other hand, my wife and I have for several years belonged to a book study group, where we pledge to read a novel every two months and then discuss it. The last novel I read is “Waiting,� by Ha Jin, the story of an army surgeon in China during the Cultural Revolution from 1965 to 1976.