Leah Libresco

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.My first book, Arriving at Amen is coming out in May 2015. It's a tour through seven Catholic prayer practices, all of which (as a convert) I had to pick up as I would a second language -- so I cobbled together a creole out of my first languages and loves: math, musicals, and medical oddities in order to find a way into spiritual life.Nowadays, I live in Washington DC, where I'm a statistician by day, and I blog about 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.