About John D. Smith

John D. Smith has always enjoyed the fine art of debate. As a boy, he would readily engage the nuns at school or his grandmother at the dinner table over such issues as the theology of limbo or the importance of one life versus another.

“I would argue with the nuns to the point where they’d call my father. On one occasion in the eighth grade, Principle Sister Virgine Marie began a morality discussion over whether Truman should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima...