Jennifer Fulwiler, atheist-turned Catholic apologist, runs Conversion Diary, a beautifully executed and winsome blog chronicling “what it’s like to be part of an orthodox faith after a life of nonbelief.” Several weeks back, she posted an audio file of her riveting yet refreshingly unvarnished conversion story.

Another good audio byte is here, where she recounts how her cultivated pro-choice mystique was, as the saying goes, mugged by reality. Another excellent post can be found here, where Fulwiler recounts a first encounter with a “real Christian”—that is, a Christian who didn’t fit the received caricature so common in secular culture:

One evening in college some friends and I were sitting around in my dorm room, getting ready to head out to go to a party, when the phone rang. Caller ID showed that it was yet another telemarketer. Our number had been inundated with sales calls, and I was getting sick of it. We had some time to kill before we needed to leave, so I decided to have some fun with the telemarketer for my friends’ amusement.

I motioned for everyone to get quiet, clicked the speakerphone button, and answered the call. Immediately a middle-aged-sounding man began his pitch, announcing that he was with a local home services company and asking me leading questions about my carpet cleaning needs.

Doing a horrible imitation of an east Texas accent, I interrupted him to say, “I don’t believe in cleaning carpets.”

He paused. “Excuse me?”

“Sir, that kind of thing is against my religion,” I said in a lecturing voice. The idea came to me to play the role of a religious zealot, to see if I could get the telemarketer to be the first one to hang up if I launched into a hellfire and brimstone lecture about how carpet cleaners were from the devil. Boy, wouldn’t my friends think that was hilarious — me, the consummate atheist, playing the character of a religious nut!

Read the rest here.