The faculty and staff at BSC have been very welcoming to me. Everybody is very friendly, and some of the faculty have made a point of stopping by daily to see how I'm doing. Which is mostly okay.

Despite my earlier post about churches, I'm still surprised by the religious attitude. Oftentimes schools of higher education are beacons of secularity, but that doesn't seem to be so here. One faculty member introduced her self, and the second sentence out of her mouth was, "Have you found a church yet?" How do I respond to that? If I simply say "no," I get to hear about the pros and cons of all 213 congregations in the area, probably heavily weighted toward the speaker's own house of worship. If I am more direct and say that I'm not Christian (or Muslim, or anything else for that matter) I get classified as a heathen to be saved.

I was having a conversation with another staff member and she wanted to know if there was anything about living in Bluefield that she could help me with. I said that we hadn't really met anybody yet, and didn't know how we were going to, quickly appending that "we're not really church people." Her response was that that was too bad, because she was going to invite us to her church, because that was how she and her husband had met their friends.

Even as I was cleaning out the desk of the man I'm replacing, I was finding pamphlets and bulletins from a local presbyterian church. Not that I've never met religious physicists before, but it is fairly rare, and in my experience, most of them are Catholic (but I guess that could just be because I went to grad school at Notre Dame).