Unequally Yoked
If you’ve come here from the Toast, and want to know more about my conversion: you might like the series of three posts I wrote before my baptism (which rely heavily on musical theatre). You might also want to take a look at my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Answer, which talks about what happened after I changed my mind — once I thought Catholicism was true, how did I learn to think with God in prayer, instead of just thinking about God.
And, for all you regulars: I was interviewed by Mallory Ortberg of The Toast as part of her series on converts! I love this series and I’m pleased to be part of it — Mallory is great about following her curiosity in these interviews, instead of going through the questions that everyone is used to asking and answerering. Here’s a preview:
OH, LEWIS. He is so many things. I find most of his apologetics to be maddening, but every time I want to throw him into the sun I find a phrase or a way of looking at things that’s quite sound and lovely and practical, and then I want to not throw him into the sun, for a while.
I love the idea you bring up of a Christianity “that couldn’t be casually dismissed,” that you were looking for reasons not to like it, and instead found yourself compelled to engage with it. Did it feel like a primarily intellectual exercise at that point?
It was definitely a mostly intellectual exercise for most of the time for me. That’s one reason why, after I converted, it was hard work learning to pray (I talk about how I did find my way into it in Arriving At Amen), because I’d been thinking about God, not with God. What a lot of this felt like was the same kind of delightful puzzling I did freshman year in my linear algebra theory class, where I’d be reading over my problem sets and then just lie back on my bed and mentally float matrices above me, and move them around in a playful way, until I suddenly noticed I had a way to prove the theorem I was supposed to write up. Religious reading and arguments had the same fiddly feel, once I got in deep enough.
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