An attractive but lonely nurse accepts a blind date setup by a co-worker and arranges for them to meet at her home. A stranger arrives on her porch before the arranged time and she mistakes him for her blind date. The stranger rapes her and leaves her seriously traumatized. Her life falls apart and she enters depression. She learns much later he is in a prison an hour away and begins visiting him, first to confront him and her fears. Then she starts to flirt and her spirits improve dramatically...

Radisson finds the topic of religion painful because his Christian mother died when he was 12, though he had prayed and begged God to spare her life. This may be what led him to study philosophy so in-depth that he ultimately became a philosophy professor, but his desire to now avoid the topic of religion does not mesh well with his career as a philosophy professor. His anger at God has him requesting his students quote Friedrich Nietzsche and, in exchange, he promises to allow them to skip the...