When I was a boy growing up in New York City, one of the nicest ways for me to spend a Saturday afternoon was at the matinee of the neighborhood theater. A group of us would arrive early and warm up on a series of cartoons. But we really went to see the cowboy movies.

We liked those movies because they were so predictable. The bad guys always wore gray and rode dark horses. Whenever they spoke, they spoke with a snarl. The good guys always wore white hats and rode white horses. And from time to time, they would stop and sing to us with their guitars.

On Sunday, if we managed to make it to Sunday school, it sometimes seemed that the same people who had written the screenplay for the movie had also written some of our Sunday school lessons, for the characters we studied there were also very gray and very white. We knew, for example, that had we been there for the showdown in Egypt between Pharaoh and Moses, Pharaoh would have been dressed in gray and Moses in white. And it was no surprise to us that David sang with a harp, because in our minds that was a kind of old-fashioned guitar.

As I grew older, though, I grew tired of those cowboy movies, just because they were so predictable. They didn't deal with real people living in a real world. Instead, they usually dealt with cardboard characters in a tissue paper play.