At Salon, Carlene Bauer excerpts her new memoir about converting to Catholicism amid sex and sin in New York City:
As a seven-year-old in the New Jersey suburbs, I accepted Jesus as my savior. I grew up attending evangelical schools, churches and youth groups, but I never felt quite at home in any of them. Evangelical Christianity preached a suspicion of the world I did not believe; I was pretty sure I could have my Morrissey and Jesus, too.
I kept thoughts like that to myself, however, and continued praying that one day I’d find a church that didn’t mind if you read writers other than C.S. Lewis, a church that didn’t mind if you wanted to enjoy life in a big city rather than drag its inhabitants toward repentance. In college, after reading Walker Percy and Dorothy Day, I got the idea that the Catholic Church could be that church.
But it was only when I started to feel a little bit lost in the biggest of cities—New York, where I had begun a job in the publishing industry—that I submitted myself to the process. And so, at the age of 27, in a city known for sex and sin, I decided to convert.
Read the entire excerpt here.