Revelation about my one (Mormon) colleague...

...that was buried in the footnote of an article that he sent me, since for our "summer book club" we're going to be reading an ancient heretical text that's he studied and written on, in conjunction with a new commentary on it that's out: A few years ago, he was writing major national museums in order to try to track down this one famous amulet used in astrological medicine by an ancient heretical sect, that was photographed and put up for auction and has subsequently disappeared from public view. And it's just something that seems to have been very time-consuming and that he just went and did, and never talks about it. It's like unearthing someone's strange and deep part of them, but in a way that makes you respect them more. I think now that we must get along in part because of our obsessiveness, and concern for the truth. It's also very interesting since our scholarly interests overlap in major major ways, but he's grounded more in the ancient and I'm grounded more in the modern, though we've both worked and written on both of the chronological ends of things... As I've told him before, it's refreshing to see his interests, since I can point to them and tell other people that I'm not so strange! He also told me once before that he's kind of envious that I've spent the last few years working on this one ancient language that he wants to learn, since it's also a tangent to the stuff that he's working on.