"I suppose? You normally discern a vocation in upper school, with the help of your Virtue teacher-- who is a monk, of course, all teachers are."

This still isn't really clearing up what a monk is, which is frustrating, because he might either need to defeat or team up with them at some point. "What is it that makes someone a monk? Is it their disposition, or a set of practices, or what career they have, or who funds them...?"

"Well, you take vows of poverty and temperance and service and trustworthiness and so on, and then the church* pays you to do the kind of work you want a trustworthy person without conflicting incentives to do."

*A different word than the one for the building; literally "the people cooperating for the common good"

"There are people on Earth who take similar vows! I don't know any that handle government work, but I can see how those are traits you would want people in those positions to have. ...This may seem like an odd jump in topics, but are there people in the Teachingsphere who don't follow the Teaching?" Because the reason monks aren't in charge of everything in America is because they believe in religious freedom, and if he has to pretend to convert at some point to avoid getting driven out on pitchforks he will but he's going to be grumpy about it.

"It's illegal but not very illegal, it's like drug use or self-harm. You just have to talk to a spiritual director once a year and give them a chance to convince you not to. I do spiritual direction for criminals myself."

Self-harm isn't illegal where he's from but drugs definitely are. He hopes the slap-on-the-wrist approach is an improvement. "I haven't spent much time in places with a state religion. Do visitors or immigrants need to convert from their original faiths?"

"We don't normally take immigrants that aren't converts, but this is an unusual situation. We'll have to figure out how the logos manifests in your home universe."

"I probably won't be staying permanently," he says apologetically, "I have responsibilities back on Earth. But I will be happy to stay here for a while before that, and then establish diplomatic relations between our worlds and leave you a signal device that can contact me." Or give one to somebody else, in case the Teachingsphere turns out to suck, but nobody needs to know up front that you think they might be evil. "What would I read if I wanted to gain an understanding of the logos?" That is ideally easy to locate using x-ray and telescopic vision. He's never tried reading a closed book on a bookshelf while in a moving train before, and there's a chance it'll give him his first case of motion sickness, but there's no point in not trying.

"Probably The Beginner's Guide to the Logos, people I know who do missionary tours recommend it."

Superman may notice that this train is labeled the QUIET CAR and there are signs that say USE OF A QUIET CAR WITHOUT A QUIET CAR PERMIT IS ILLEGAL AND MAY RESULT IN A FINE. The people in this car are more chill than those on the street, though one is crying quietly. Someone is reading a book called Calculus: How We Understand Change that has a sticker on it saying "Plain language edition! Recommended for those with IQs of 80 to 90." 

It has been reasonably quiet. He's been tracking the crying person but not trying to help, he keeps messing up here and this is honestly one of the least concerning displays of emotion he's seen today. The person with the book is surprising but he thinks he approves of whatever's going on there. "Does the logos encourage, er, intense displays of emotion?" he does ask, in case the answer is 'yes, that is one of our core teachings'. ...Self-harm is illegal. He's pretty sure he's witnessed several people self-harming. That feels like some kind of clue.

(His gives up on locating and reading a copy of The Beginner's Guide to the Logos when it starts looking like more effort than it's worth. He can always do that once he's in an actual church and not on a moving train.)

"You're not supposed to be carried away by your emotions or to repress them," Brother Hope says. "You're supposed to unify your emotions and your reason in order to find wisdom."

"Would you say people in this city usually succeed at that?" He's not trying to sound skeptical really he's not it's just coming through a bit anyways.

"Well, we're not all saints, but we do better than people in the rest of the world."

"Huh."

"If I flew around the entire planet, looking for people from all kinds of places, what kinds of things would I see?"

"Mostly small villages, not larger than a few hundred people, very poor. Occasional cities on trade routes, full of garbage and disease and violence. Occasional atrocities."

"Even the Teachingsphere must have some garbage and disease and violence." There's something about this he doesn't like. The major options so far seem like either the Teaching sucks but is masking that with racism and propaganda or they actually are above-average and their world is just worse than modern-day Earth. Or maybe they're weird aliens, or maybe they've actually figured out something important and humans should be having more breakdowns, or some other thing, you should always be on the lookout for signs that some bizarre thing that would never occur to you is happening.

"Of course, but the cities elsewhere are really bad. We have garbage services and don't just have refuse piling up everywhere."

"That's always good." Gonna have to doublecheck all of these claims both here and abroad later. Right now he's developing a beef with the curvature of the Earth.

"You mentioned saints. What do those look like?"

"Oh, well, they're naturally much better at emotional regulation and distress tolerance than normal people. I tested 'saint' myself, that's why I do deescalation, you don't want someone who's going to bite themself when they're overwhelmed doing deescalation work."

"...I'm not used to there being a test! Usually the people we call saints are only sainted after they die. I suppose if you're measuring the highest potential for good rather than the holiest lives lived there's a lot less chance of getting it wrong." He's not clear on the fine details of the selection practice, actually, you don't get many Catholics in rural Kansas and it's usually not a very pressing part of helping them out. He's been to the Vatican before but the topic didn't really come up, which at the time he was frankly grateful for. ...Is Superman a saint here? He really hopes he isn't. He likes getting recognition for his good qualities but getting declared a living saint crosses some kind of line.

"Oh! Holiest lives lived is a very different thing, that's called a 'sage,' and of course you wouldn't call someone a sage until they're dead. It creates a weird relationship with them. For that matter, every few decades we have to have a big committee meeting and argue about which people should be removed from 'sage' status because we've learned more about ethics and it turned out they were Bad Actually. --Last I checked, sages are somewhat more likely than average to have below tenth percentile emotional regulation and distress tolerance? Of course some of that is that it's easier to figure out what sagely behavior is if you're below tenth percentile emotional regulation."

"You know, I don't know enough about holy people to know how good at emotional regulation they are. They're good at avoiding sins and talking to God and they do many good deeds and are willing to die for their beliefs, which might call for a different skillset, though I'm not sure it's, er, an opposed one. When I return to my Earth I will recommend you some priests."

"I'd be very grateful! We're very interested in learning new things about what the logos commands. That's probably one of the most valuable things about meeting people from a new world."

It's their stop!

That's a very religious outlook. He supposes he is talking to a monk.

He will gladly follow Brother Hope off the train and politely greet anyone else they need to interact with on their way from there through the church to an appropriate meeting room.

Brother Hope takes him to a small meeting room!

It has absurdly comfortable chairs. These are some amazingly comfortable chairs. Something which is recognizably a variant of the Serenity Prayer is on the wall. 

"Have you made first contact with aliens before?" he asks.