Education Quote by Elizabeth Moon

A résumé of piety delivered in clipped, almost stubborn beats, this line reads like a preemptive defense against being misread. Moon stacks church roles the way someone might stack credentials in a hostile room: not to brag, but to establish standing. The repetition of "I've" does quiet rhetorical work, insisting on lived participation rather than abstract belief. Sunday school, choir, directing a choir: these aren’t private devotions; they’re public, communal labor. The subtext is, I know this world from the inside, so don’t tell me what Christians are like, or what faith requires, or that I’m speaking as an outsider.

That matters because Moon, as a genre writer who has moved through military science fiction and fantasy, has often been read through cultural assumptions about who gets to claim moral authority. The line signals a refusal to be shoved into the simplistic boxes readers use when religion shows up in speculative fiction: either as enlightened critique or unthinking dogma. By naming service roles, she positions herself as someone who has practiced the unglamorous, sustaining parts of a faith community: teaching children, showing up weekly, doing the work of making music happen.

The phrasing is tellingly unadorned. No testimony, no theological flourish. Just tasks. It’s a writer’s version of scene-setting: before you judge the characters, the values, or the moral architecture of the story, understand the narrator’s vantage point. In three short clauses, Moon stakes a claim to credibility and complicates the caricature of the religious as merely loud, credulous, or political.