Human Studies, the official journal of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS), has been with me as a beacon, guide, comfort, and joy for more than twenty years. I first came to know of the journal and SPHS in the 1980s from Professor Richard Owsley, a philosophy colleague at the University of North Texas. He encouraged me to attend a meeting of SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) at Northwestern University. (SPHS met along with SPEP.) When I used lack of travel funds as an excuse for not going, he said, "But you have a credit card, don't you?" At that time I was a professor at Texas Woman's University, where I taught graduate courses in phenomenology, hermeneutics and ethnomethodology in a Ph.D. program in sociology, under the rubric "qualitative methods." Within a few years, I became known as "the one who teaches phenomenology and all those other strange things." (These were the words of a friendly but staunchly positivist colleague.) Students from other graduate departments, such as dance, nursing, education, and psychology, often enrolled in my courses because they found that by using phenomenologically informed approaches they could find ways of researching what most interested them. As a respected scholarly journal, Human Studies validated what I was teaching, giving life and viability to reaching beyond what C. Wright Mills called "quantophrenia" and "abstracted grand theories" (Mills, 1959). Articles and issues featuring topics such as conversation analysis, hermeneutics, or current continental thinking provided avenues for students to access research rarely taught out? side of special enclaves. I had been interested in Schutz's phenomenological sociology since gradu? ate school, which I attended in the 1970's but there were no courses offered which included Schutz' work. As an American social scientist, I had been well trained in statistical techniques, including path and regression analysis, math? ematical modeling, experimental design, and survey research design. Path analysis diagrams show the degree of relationship between variables. We were required at that time to perform the regression beta coefficients on a hand