Over at the Huffington Post, Steven Denlinger has been writing on his movement away from his family's conservative Mennonite faith.  It's all worth reading--especially for someone who, like me, grew up in Amish country--but this story made a particular impression:

WHEN WAS THE PRECISE MOMENT I decided to leave the world of my birth?

THE MOMENT OF DECISION, the emotional Rubicon I crossed, occurred during a conversation with a Muslim girl in London, England in April, 1989. I was attending Richmond College, living on the Kensington campus. I was 25 years old.

I don't even remember the young woman's name. The two of us were standing in the common room, waiting to collect the day's mail. It was almost the end of my year abroad. A classmate from my Chaucer class had just introduced us, and we were having one of those random conversations that suddenly goes deep. She had asked me about my world, and reciprocated by telling me about her own strict and loving father and her own birth world.

Although she was dressed like any Western girl, my new friend told me that when she returned to Egypt, she would take off her clothes and put on the garb of her father's culture. The demands of modesty she would face made the women's apparel within my own Amish-Mennonite world look positively slutty. And then, as I listened to her describe the patriarchal world of her birth, it finally hit me.

I realized that although the trappings of her birth world were different, and the theology read in a different language, the religious principle that put men in control of her world was the same.

That moment caramelized all of my questions. Suddenly, my life changed, forever.