access...” It is perhaps strange to come to this common knowledge so late, but | came to my life with my forbearers and father’s magical, mystical biases. My father had parodied what he thought was the “wasteful time” spent in rational, Talmudic discussion. He said that is what Jewish men spent their time doing to avoid physical work while sitting near the city gates. It was the women who raised the crops and cared for the cattle and children. He had a favorite conundrum satirizing the village gate discussions. Jewish males, after the age of thirteen, accompany their morning prayer of commitment to loving and serving God with the ritual of wrapping scripture embedded animal skin, tefillin, and winding them seven times around the left arm, near the heart, and around the head, symbolizing the mind. This contextualizes how my father made fun of a typical topic of these all male Talmudic seminars: “If one had seven arms, would one wrap the fefillin once around each appendage or seven times about one of them. If the latter is the case, how would one chose which one.” In fact, there remains an on-going debate about the order with which the embedded four passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy should be arranged and inserted in the fefillin such that some compromising orthodox Jews wear two types of fefi/lin, each representing one of the theoretically justified orderings. | know now that there is an implicitly positive confirmation of a jointly held faith and feeling of ethnic belonging achieved by such apparently abstract discourse and argumentation. In truth, | had not come to Warwick to explore the relationships between faith and rationality using the cognitive style of mathematicism, but rather to be saved by the mathematical miracles of the Brain God. Not unrelated to what C.S. Lewis saw as a prominent characteristic of spiritual experience, “wonder,” and what Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh in their 1981 book, The Mathematical Experience, spoke of as “beauty” and “surpr