Reverend William "Scotty" L. McLennan engaged about 130 students, churchgoers and panel members in a conversation about religion and spirituality at the Divinity School yesterday evening.

In his new book, McLennan, one of the inspirations for Rev. Scott Sloan of the Doonesbury comic strip by Garry Trudeau, aims to help people discover religion by leading them through six stages of spiritual development.

McLennan, who is also the Tufts University Chaplain, sat for more than an hour after the panel meticulously signing over 70 copies of his book, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Lost Its Meaning, copies of which had quickly sold out. Some attendees spoke to the author as if he were their personal spiritual leader.

McLennan, with his bushy eyebrows, beard and fading red hair, resembles Trudeau's character, who is also modeled after William Sloane Coffin. Coffin was McLennan's mentor and the Yale chaplain while he and Trudeau were undergraduate suite-mates there.

"Gary has made me feel like a life-long walking joke," McLennan said to the audience.

McLennan himself entered college in the late 1960s as an atheist. It was Chaplain Coffin who helped him find religion, Unitarian Universalism.

Brent B. Coffin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, introduced McLennan last night, remarking that Finding Your Religion had an important message in an increasingly chaotic time.

"The book reminds us that the world's great religions are not stops on the superhighway, but are paths within themselves," he said.