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.
Nowadays, I blog daily on religion, philosophy (and as many theatre reviews as I can get away with) for Patheos at Unequally Yoked: A Geeky Convert Picks Fights in Good Faith. My writing has also appeared in First Things, The American Conservative, Commonweal, The American Interest, and others. I’ve spoken on CNN, at Chicago Ideas Week, and could come to speak to you!
Meanwhile, in my day jobs, I’ve been a news writer for FiveThirtyEight, a public policy researcher, and a curriculum developer at the Center for Applied Rationality. (At that one, my responsibilities included everything from designing and running prediction markets to throwing a murder mystery party that was also a lesson in Bayesian updating). Currently, I work at a remittance company, to help workers abroad send money home to their families.
Finally, the books I most frequently lend to people (with or without their permission) include:
Flatland – Edwin Abbott
The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton
So You Want to Be a Wizard – Diane Duane
Gödel Escher Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
The Great Divorce – C.S. Lewis
Witches Abroad – Terry Pratchett
Arcadia – Tom Stoppard
