My friend, Alasdair MacIntyre, died this year. I call him my friend, although our paths crossed only intermittently. I first met him, when he was speaking in Boulder. “I may be a member of the Moral Majority,” he told me. Well, I was too, in a similarly modulated way. Later, when After Virtue appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, I asked him whether he had been prepared for the celebrity. “Not at all,” he said, “not in the least.” But he took it in stride and it served him and his world audience well.

Alasdair owed me nothing. We had never been colleagues or in any other special relationship. Nevertheless, he offered a generous endorsement whenever I asked for it. A few years ago, as he was growing older, lest I leave something important unsaid, I send him a note thanking him for his many kindnesses.

He wrote back that he owed the greater debt to me. For what? For having shared my God experience with him. Though defending one set of philosophical battlements after another over the years, he came, before the end, to have an open soul. God bless him!