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 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.

My newest book, Building the Benedict Option is a guide to opening your home, inviting people in, and praying together. It's a book I hope you put down before you're finished, because you're already planning to have people over to sing hymns, have their kids babysat, etc.

I live in New York City, and I've worked as a statistics professor, a data journalist, and assorted other unusual jobs. You can keep up with my writing and speaking at leahlibresco.com