I love The Gone-Away World but reading it is definitely...an experience. (And secretly, I love Angelmaker even more.)

at worst I feel like I'm back in some sort of secular parallel to Sunday School.

This is a great way of putting it. Emotional self-awareness and calmly talking things through are things I absolutely I want to have present in real life situations. But I enjoy fiction precisely because I can vicariously experience things--like asteroid strikes, zombie plagues, Ringwraiths and maladaptive approaches to conflict--I don't want to deal with in real life.