Some kind of editor

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My cell phone rang on the commute van about half-way to Chapel Hill this morning. It was loud, which reminded me of the van's policy of limiting cell phone usage so as not to bother other riders, which in turn reminded me how I'd complained of the driver's playing religious stations on the radio when I first started riding (I told her I'd signed up to commute, not to attend Sunday School).
    It was my wife. "The Chapel Hill Herald published a letter of yours this morning."
    "Yes, I know."

I'd looked at p. 2 immediately after collecting the paper from the driveway and was surprised to see my letter printed there, looking longer on the page than it had in the submission box. (In a comment on Monday—"'Daughters of thy uncles and aunts'"—I expressed doubt that the paper would print my potentially explosive missive.)
    Maybe I was even apprehensive that it would print it. I had come to feel unsure about my tactic of appropriating Hurley's logical space for the purpose of extending his criticism of Islam to Christianity. After all, my letter was suggesting that a Christian's belief in heavenly reward for assenting to the literal truth of a myth borrowed from pagan precursors to Christianity was no more credible than a Muslim's belief in heavenly reward for blowing himself up in order to kill a few enemies of Islam.
    But I continued to hope that my concluding "joke" about swimming trunks had lightened the tone, if not enough to defuse the bomb, at least enough to dampen its explosion in this nominally Christian society.