Becoming Catholic
I grew up as an atheist on Long Island. When I went to college, I picked fights with the most interesting wrong people I could find — which turned out to be the campus Catholics.
After reading an awful lot of books, years of late-night debates (the kinds that tended to include sentences like “Ok, imagine for the moment that God is a cylinder…”), and a fair amount of blogging, I was surprised but pleased to find out that I’d been wrong about religion, generally, and Catholicism in particular, and I was received into the Catholic Church in the winter of 2012.
What I Do Now
I’m a freelance writer, covering religion, statistics, and as much theater as I can get tickets for. My writing has appeared in First Things, America, The American Conservative, Commonweal, The American Interest, and others. I’m the author of Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer, which tells the story of how I learned to pray. My second book, Building the Benedict Option, is a guide to building thicker Christian community. I’ve spoken on CNN, at Theology on Taps in multiple countries, at Chicago Ideas Week, and I could come to speak to you!
In my day jobs, I’ve been a public policy researcher, a news writer for FiveThirtyEight, the HR lead for a remittance company, and a curriculum developer for the Center for Applied Rationality. (At that last one, my responsibilities included throwing a murder mystery party that was also a lesson in Bayesian statistics and updating your beliefs). Currently, I work in lay ministry for students at Princeton.
I run two substacks. Tiny Book Club is a, well, tiny book club, where I pick an interesting article or essay for discussion month. Other Feminisms is a community focused on the dignity of interdependence.
I live in New Jersey with my husband, Alexi Sargeant.