When I was young, I was called brainiac.

I was called professor.

So I saw those young black kids as prognosticators and prophets because I am a professor today.

My father was an extremely hardworking man, as was my mother.

I've had a pretty steady job since I was ten or 11 years old because we worked after school at a local nursery.

And so every day after school my father taught us that we had to be on our job.

When he was laid off from the factory, refusing to go on welfare, refusing to stay in those impoverished circumstances, he'd rather hustle.

We used to pick up steel off the street, go downtown, and get it measured and weighed, so we could make some money.

I was inclined toward books and thinking.

But there were a lot of smart kids in my neighborhood.

Not all of them were encouraged.

Not all of them had their identities nurtured by people who saw their talents, their gifts, and their abilities, and who said, "Hey, you can do this."

So I understood from a very young age, even when I was involved in gangs, me and my brother, in the Stanford gang.

One of the gang leaders said, "Look, you get at the back "of the line.

You've got talent, and you've got ability."

He literally told me, "You shouldn't be here.

"You should be at the back.

We need to protect you."

So there were people even in my peer group who understood that I possessed a certain talent that they thought should be nurtured and protected.

And because of people like them, I'm able to do what I'm able to do now.

I was nine years old watching television, my father sitting in his favorite chair behind me.

And the newsman interrupted the regular programming to announce that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee.

My father went, "Hmm."

You know, it was one of those guttural reactions that people sometimes make when grief is too deep for words.

And I was asking my mother, "Which one is he?"

And I can still remember Dr. King's words.

"But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land."

I was like, "My god, look at those words "which are containers for the pathos and possibilit of black existence."

Using words to move people.

And in my childhood, he became a bellwether for a commitment to justice, to articulate intellectual ideas, and also to shoot for as an example of how you could move the crowd with your words.

My mother was committed to the church even when she didn't go.

But she would send us to Sunday school.

Dr. Sampson was the greatest influence on my life.

He was my pastor.

A linguistic acrobat, to be sure.

I wanted to be like him.

At 12 years old, when he came to my church, he identified my talent.

We began to hang out.

I had a friendship, I can honestly say, with my pastor.

I chose Princeton because I wanted to study religion.

So I was committed to a ministry of the mental, a ministry of the mind, where I could use words, ideas, concepts, analyses, to further the cause of the kingdom, but also to use it in defense of vulnerable and struggling people.

Over the last 30 some years as I've been a minister and a talk show host, and seeing how religion has both helped people and hurt them, has both edified them and then also devastated them... to me, God is love.

Where love shows itself without excuse or apolog to render service in the name of the higher good.

That to me is God.

And that to me is religion.