Once Steve left the kitchen to start his second load of laundry, I finished opening the wine bottle and poured out a glass for each of us. Torpe that I am, I was afraid that I would spill something if I tried to take everything into the living room altogether, so I started with the wine and placed the glasses at the near end of the coffee table in front of the sofa. While walking back into the kitchen, I listened for Steve making laundry noises. Before picking up the cheese and crackers, I stuck my head into the corridor and called out, "Snacks are ready! Everything OK in there?"

"Yeah, I'm good! I've bagged the colors, and just starting the whites. I'll be with you in a minute." 

Yes, this was going well. Smiling to myself, I pulled a few paper napkins out of the pack on the back of the counter, opened the utensils drawer, took out a couple of forks and put them on top of the napkins on top of the plates. I picked up the cheese and crackers tray, then the plates and napkins, and called back, "OK. I'll wait for you in the living room."

I put the cheese and crackers tray in the middle of the coffee table and placed the plates and napkins between it and the wine. Now that I had Steve excited, I had to keep him at a safe distance until we left for his place, or we would end up echar un polvete, and I had just freshened up. Not that I didn't want to keep him on edge, just that I wanted us to keep our clothes on, at least until we were in his apartment. I moved one glass and a plate with a fork and a napkin to one end of the coffee table and took the other wine glass for me to the other. That should queue him where we should be sitting. I put a few of the crackers, some cheese and a dab of mustard onto my plate, sat down and tucked my feet under me.

Steve was a bit of a puzzle. He didn't have any apparent flaws - but then why wasn't he taken? Intelligent, articulate, polite, clean. Men like him were choice picks. Perhaps he was divorced? He seemed too young to be divorced, and anyway, he probably would have learned about oral sex from his wife. I speared a piece of cheese, swirled it in the mustard, and pushed it onto a cracker. And muscular; he felt like he kept in shape. I picked up the cracker and absent-mindedly began to nibble at it. Steve was a handsome package. I was going to find out more.

Steve's footsteps in the hallway shook me from my meditation. "OK. I have my last load started. After it is done, we can go to my place to finish up."

He slowed down and frowned when he saw me on the sofa at one end of the coffee table, and his place at the other end with the cheese tray between us. Underlining the obvious, I pointed at his wine glass, and before he could object, I reopened the conversation about science and religion.

"So Steve, you gave me a good example of how careful I should be when questioning if someone was a scientist. But that's only an example. What about the general classes of 'Science' with a capital 'S' and 'Religion' with a capital 'R'?"

It was a wonder to watch him change from a disappointed male into an engaged teacher. Steve squared his shoulders, and I'll swear his voiced altered to be more forceful and confident. He resumed his lecture as if he hadn't been doing his laundry and almost raping me at the kitchen counter. Men are too strange!

"Well, Anna, even the most openly nonreligious person can't avoid the daily influence of religion in their lives in ways as obvious as current events, vocabulary, or the very ways we think about the world."

This was easy. "True. It doesn't take many suicide bombers to get that point across."

"They are vivid examples, aren't they? Also, think about how deeply religion is embedded in our language. Think along the lines of figures of speech. For instance, 'He doesn't have a prayer,' and 'He's beyond redemption;' both presume a supernatural or spiritual reality, even when they are used to describe situations in the here and now."

"Similarly, even the scientifically untrained or disinterested cannot go a day without coming in contact with science or with one of its technological products."

Nodding agreement, "Global Warming is a prime example of that."

"Global Warming is what you might describe as a 'hot' topic," he paused while I rolled my eyes at his wordplay, "but technology is changing our world in many other ways as well. You'll remember the Antarctic 'ozone hole' which was created by industrial chemicals."

Smiling, "Yeah, I remember that. They were refrigerator coolants and fire extinguishing gases that had to be banned." I took a sip of wine and helped myself to some more of the cheese and crackers. I pushed the tray towards Steve, "Here, have some cheese and crackers?"

He took a sip of his wine, and then another, then put his glass down. Always the gentleman, he complimented my selection, saying "Nice wine." Then he pulled the cheese tray over to his plate with "Thanks, don't mind if I do."

He continued talking as he used his fork to pull some cheese cubes on to his plate. "Reading almost any daily newspaper will convince you that both science and religion continue to be important influences on our daily world, both for good and for ill. Their impact is everywhere. We can't escape either one. So even those who think they're indifferent to either science or religion," and here he looked up at me and smiled, "are really just deluding themselves like ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand."

"You're singing to the choir, Steve." I put down my wineglass, stretched out my arm and leaned across the coffee table to pull the cheese and crackers back towards me, and gave Steve a good look down my blouse while I was at it. I wasn't going to let his attention stray too far from me. I took my time putting the cheese and crackers on my plate.

When I sat back and looked up, Steve was enjoying the view over the rim of his wineglass. "So, when you teach your course, what are the limits? What do you mean by "science" and "religion?"

Putting his wineglass down, he replied "There are many religions in the world, of course. And you can ask interesting questions about the relationship of any one of them with science. But my course is focused specifically on the science-religion interactions in the Latin West." He paused to drag a cheese cube through the mustard, put it on a cracker, and pop the assembly in his mouth.

This was obviously my queue. "What do you mean by the Latin West?"

He swallowed and washed the cracker down with some more wine. "What I mean are the lands that were once the Latin-speaking parts of the Roman Empire and its successors. In other words, predominantly Western Europe and the Mediterranean. In the sense I am using the term, I am also including the most important offspring of European culture - North and South America."

I couldn't resist getting in a gentle dig. "Was your selection based on your expected audience?"

Steve grinned. "Partially, yes. Most of my undergrads, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof, or of their historical ethnic origins, are Americans, and so have lived their lives in a public and intellectual culture which is Western European in origin and character. Therefore, this Western European focus seems to make sense in terms of relevance to my students' lives."

"Do you have any difficulties with foreign students, like language or cultural disconnects?" I asked.

Steve speared, then dragged his last piece of cheese slowly across the plate, leaving a channel through the mustard. "Not really. By the time they are able to take university-level courses, they've had enough exposure to American English that I seldom have to work through language issues with students." He bit carefully into his morsel, then continued. "Cultural issues are more frequent - particularly with those from the Orient. Theirs has fewer things in common with ours than those from Latin or South America. Sometimes a metaphor or simile I use leaves some foreign students scratching their heads, but not too often."

Steve put down his empty plate, picked up his wine glass, and after sniffing it, emptied it with a long sip. He smiled and looked me in the eyes. "Tasty snacks, nice wine, and pleasant conversation. What more could one ask for?"

I leaned towards him and reached out for the wine glass Steve knew to hand it to me, pausing long enough to let him look down my blouse again. Mmmm. Running my fingers up across your chest, I thought, through the hair I just knew covered it. You licking the inside of my thighs, then up across my tummy to kiss my breasts. Slowly sliding into me. Your naked body nailing me into the mattress.

"Major appliances that don't break down?" I asked with mock seriousness.

Steve laughed good-naturedly and looked away as I took his wine glass. "Good one! But the downside is that we might never have gotten to know each other."

¡Arrestar! That caught my attention! Time to refocus the conversation.

I smiled and filled his glass. "True, true. But surely there were other reasons you selected, what do you call it, the 'Latin West' as the secular side for comparison?"

"Yes, there is, and really it was the primary justification for my choice. Modern science is primarily a product of the Latin West. If we want to draw meaningful connections between historical events and modern-day concerns, it seems reasonable to look at the culture that's most directly the parent of our own. This cultural focus immediately has one advantage. It helps me define the religion of my focus, Christianity, the dominant religion of European and New World cultures. Of course, there are many interesting and enlightening episodes in religion-science interactions in Islam and in Judaism. But unfortunately, I can't cover them in a three-credit intro course."

"Anyway, there is enough diversity within the Christian tradition, particularly after the Reformation in the 16th-century, and the 19th-century explosion of North American splinter sects. So, my students have their hands full just dealing with diversity within Christianity while studying its interactions with Science in the Western Tradition."

"As I mentioned before, there are many, many foolish and childish claims bandied about in discussions of science and religion. Part of my job is to get past all of those, to achieve a well-grounded and, most of all, properly contextualized view of what really happened and why. I try to untangle the real issues in play and try to show that some of these issues are intricately philosophical and intellectual. Some of them might make you stretch your mind a bit. At other times, these issues were political or social, and sometimes just personal."

I heard the washer buzz, announcing that the spin cycle had finished. Steve heard it too and looked at me quizzically.

"That means your whites are done," I said. "You go bag them, and I'll clean up here so that we can drive to your place and finish up."

"Right." Steve picked up his wine, swigged it empty, and handed the glass to me.

I stood up, bent over, and reached out across the table to give him one more glance at what I had available, then took the glass and began tending to our snack leftovers.

Steve stood up and hurried off to get his clothes.