Allen, thanks for your quick and useful reply!
[...] I have found that it is best to use Evil for the basic set of vim key bindings and vim feature emulation, and let Emacs take care of the rest. Try not to go too crazy rebinding commands until you've at least spent a month or so familiarizing yourself with the defaults. [...]
Thanks for the advice. It's worth it to do this, since trouble-shooting is much easier this way.
[...] What am I doing wrong?
Apparently, I needed to set the variables dir-where-you-store-org-files and org-agenda-files, as shown here: http:// stackoverflow.com/questions/18011098/emacs-org-mode-todo-list-missing-items
[...] (What's ";a"?) [...]
That is a key binding for the agenda when using evil org mode: https://github.com/edwtjo/evil-org-mode I'm following your suggestion and now am not using this for the time being. -Andrew