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This will be a long read – but well worth a visit after nearly 23 years. It is Tom Junod’s account in Esquire of his meetings with Fred Rogers – famed as ‘Mister Rogers’ of The Neighbourhood. This recently became the subject of the film, A Beautiful Day In the Neighbourhood.

it’s not a bad post to put beside my previous one, Twilight of the gods? Now also posted on MercatorNet as Can societies abandon religion and continue to prosper?

Junod begins his story like this.

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy’s brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as “Young Rabbit,” or even “Rabbit”; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. The little boy didn’t know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray. He would grow up to become a great prayer, this little boy, but only intermittently, only fitfully, praying only when fear and desperation drove him to it, and the night he threw Old Rabbit into the darkness was the night that set the pattern, the night that taught him how. He prayed for Old Rabbit’s safe return, and when, hours later, his mother and father came home with the filthy, precious strip of rabbity roadkill, he learned not only that prayers are sometimes answered but also the kind of severe effort they entail, the kind of endless frantic summoning. And so when he threw Old Rabbit out the car window the next time, it was gone for good.

Read on here.