 It's an absolute delight to be at this conference. This is my first time here, as Scott mentioned. I am a visiting fellow at Franciscan University. So it's wonderful that those two paths, this conference and the work that I do at Franciscan, converge here, and I'm just very grateful to Scott and Kimberly for what they've built here and for allowing me to be a small part of it. So before I tell you my conversion story or share my witness as it were, I wanna put forward two caveats before you. The first is that my conversion is what's typically called an quote unquote intellectual conversion. And it's true that books and ideas played a significant role in my decision, quite to my own surprise at the time in some ways in 2016 to join the Catholic church. But the danger or the temptation of such conversion stories is that they can sometimes resemble a kind of act of heroic reading and thinking. The protagonist of the story reads this book and then they read a different book and then he reads this third book and they kind of clash but then some synergy emerges out of the two and it's all his own sort of heroic labor that ultimately opens the path to Rome or across the Tiber. And so as I tell the story, you might hear some notes that sound like that but what I'm asking you is to always remember that in all of these cases, it's our Lord who is the primary actor and the reading and the thinking and the ideas are responses to that invitation from above and not something that generates from below. And as you'll see that with some of the sort of accidental elements in my conversion story that couldn't have happened but for what I believe were providential little nudges and so just keep that in mind. The second thing is obviously as you've probably read my name in the bio or heard it from Scott, it's a foreign sounding name and part of my story begins across an ocean. And so there's a kind of exotic element to it. You know, there's this guy, his name's Sora but what I want you to focus on is all the ways in which it's actually quite ordinary and mundane not the things that are really, they're not the substance of the story, they're accidental elements of it and so focus on the substance and you'll see that it's not so exotic and therefore it can resonate with many people and that sort of touches also on this other fact which is why am I standing before you? You know, it is perfectly legal. I don't think the church has dictated anything of the kind or issued any order that says that if you convert you have to tell your story publicly. And I think one is allowed, it's perfectly permissible to just convert to Catholicism. So I'll tell you why in my case and that kind of touches on the exoticism aspect as well and then I'll get into the story proper. So when I was received into the church, I was living in Europe, you'll get the actual details of why that is and while I had just begun the process of catechesis something horrible happened in France, a priest by the name of Father Jacques Amel was murdered by a pair of jihadists in Islam, in France, but a pair of jihadists who identified with the Islamic State and they beheaded him but not before he could yell out at his attackers, get away Satan. And he was doing this, this was done while he was celebrating the mass and as I said, I was just beginning the process of catechesis and I was obviously very shook by this story, I was very moved by it and so I did what any millennial does, I tweeted out something like, I am Jacques Amel, which was actually modeled after the hashtag that emerged after the Islamist attack on the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and people started saying Je suis Charlie Hebdo, I said I am Father Amel and oh, by the way, this is a good time as any to announce that I'm preparing to become a Roman Catholic. That tweet went absolutely viral, tens of thousands of people liked it, thousands of people retweeted it and then it made its way to Facebook and by the way, the response was overwhelmingly positive save for a few of our evangelical friends who were like, where are the horror of Babylon? For the most part people were very receptive but there was a misunderstanding, a lot of Catholic and Christian media picked up this story and I already had a public profile as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal at the time and because they looked up my Wikipedia page and saw that I had been born in Iran, they interpreted it to mean that I had been a Muslim and a practicing Muslim five times a day, et cetera and instantaneously this brutal act had converted me to Catholicism and none of that was true, as you'll hear, I wasn't really Muslim or any sort of practicing Muslim or even a believer when I began my journey toward the phase nor was I really, nor as amazing as that story would have been if I had just been converted by this single martyrdom, that would have been like a much more attractive story in some ways but it just wasn't true so I was compelled to tell the story of my conversion in part just to correct these misunderstandings that were proliferating at the speed of the internet. So, but there is an element of Islam in my story, there is an element of being born in the Middle East, I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1985, February 1st, in fact, 1985, which was six years to the date that the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile to herald the Islamic revolution and usher away 2,500 years of Persian monarchy and established the Islamic Republic and the fact that I had been born on this fateful anniversary was something of a running joke. Now here I start to get embarrassed because Scott has heard this probably more than once so I apologize for getting a repeat, Scott. But the fact that I had been born on this anniversary was something of a running joke in our family. Most of my family had opposed the revolution, saved notably from my own immediate parents and my maternal grandfather, but the rest of them had opposed it and they were the kind of Iranian secularists that you may be familiar with or Middle Eastern secularists more broadly. And so for them, the date, February 1st, was an odious name and when I would meet for family reunions with this particular relative, distant relative who had been a colonel, a police officer under the Shah, part of the security apparatus of the Shah, he would always play this joke where he would ask my father, he would always play this joke where he would ask my birthday, like, what's your birthday, Saurabh? And I knew that he knew, that I knew that he knew the answer but we would play along anyway and so I would say February 1st and he would hold his nose and say, like, piff, piff, you brought the Imam with you, you brought Khomeini with you. So that's the kind of milieu that I grew up in, in Iran, was largely secular and the world that I lived in was really a dual world. There was the world behind closed doors where my parents were quote, unquote, intellectuals, my father was an architect, my mother was an abstract expressionist painter, I was sort of enveloped in this grand two-story house in central Tehran with Western books and bourgeois vibes and my parents drank, even my grandparents, my maternal grandparents who lived downstairs from us, they were fairly secular Muslims, they believed and they did their prayers but they also drank the occasional glass of wine and that's the kind of Islam that they practiced whereas my parents' generation had been totally secular and in a way they were children of, my parents were children of 1968 which is a familiar phenomenon, whether in Iran or in San Francisco or Paris in those years, they had this vague idea that they would democratize Iran or achieve something called freedom and they didn't quite calculate what freedom would mean under the concept of the guardianship of the jurist consult, the rule of the cleric or how you could have an Islamic Republic as the government came to be formed so they were sort of naive but anyway, they tried to shield me from all that so I grew up, as I said, in this world of Western books and movies and alcohol that flowed freely and talk of elevated things and also lots of American-type movies and Reagan era cartoons from which I picked up English more or less without an American accent or with an American accent, I should say and then there was the world that was outside our doors and this was a society that was rapidly re-Islamizing itself and Islamic piety was enforced on pain of judicial foggings and amputations in some cases and I lived in the tension between those two worlds and the sort of hypocrisies that it generated, you say certain things at home that you couldn't say at school and I would constantly push the envelope at school of course but I did have a childhood belief in God in the way that children imagine a bearded man in the sky who would get you the toy that you want or save you from the wages of not having done your homework I had that kind of a simple childish belief and as I grew older, even that belief, I'd lost it because in Iran it was if you were part of my parents, like I said, milieu of intellectuals and so forth, it was just assumed that you were an atheist, that to be an atheist was just what it meant to be intelligent and urbane whereas religion was for the sort of provincial type masses. Still, even at school where the Islamic theology and Quran was part of the school curriculum, I was moved by certain things about Islam even as my belief was beginning, I was beginning to shed any of my belief. So in Islam, especially the Shiite branch of Islam that it prevails in Iran, it is the minority sect within the Islamic world but Iranians adopted it in the 16th century. In that Shiite sect, there's a kind of rich tradition of martyrology that here's a quick one on one, if you don't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, maybe in the post-911 world everyone learned but the Sunnis believed that the Caliphs who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad were the rightful leaders of the Muslim ummah, the body of Muslims whereas the Shiites believe that it was his immediate blood kin and their children, the 12 imams that followed from the related, some brother-in-law, I can't remember exactly with the family relation, that's how Islamically serious I was but at any rate that that's the legitimate line of succession to the Prophet and of these imams that followed the Prophet I should say, one of them who's saying has a very moving story because obviously he's surrounded by the Caliph at one point and he only has his 72 followers whereas there the Caliph, the Sunni Caliph has army of tens of thousands and they're all massacred by the Caliph's armies but this idea that Hussain, Imam Hussain had laid down his life for the truth and for his friends. Even as I didn't really believe in the broader structures of the faith and its precepts, there was something extremely moving that even still gives me a kind of goosebumps or an emotional reaction, the idea of a laid down one's life for something larger than oneself for the truth as he saw it and that got seared into me as I said but meanwhile I did become an atheist at age 13 and meaning declaring myself to be an atheist and the circumstances were that we lived in Tehran but like many middle class or upper middle class families for the summers we would vacation on the Caspian Sea which geography factoid is not really a sea it's just a big lake but it's a convention to call it a sea. It divides Iran and the Caucasus and we would go and typically stay at a friend's villa or something. On this occasion we were stopped on the way there like we were going in a convoy and my parents I should say were divorced at this point but because like I said they were kind of liberal bohemians they had pretended, in fact they'd been divorced for six, seven years at this point but they pretended to be together for my sake to shield me from the blows of their divorce and so we were in a car but there was also a third male friend who was actually the driver of the car and we were stopped at a morality police checkpoint and the question became what is the relationship is there some illicit relationship between this one woman and the two am I an illegitimate child or something like that so I was interrogated with lights not unlike the ones that are on the stage and this morality police officer asked one five five six six does that number mean anything to you son and I was like no and he said well that's supposedly your father's national identity number yet you don't know it, it's like what? Anyway, they let us go after they figured out that I am in fact my purported father's son et cetera but then we had more trouble when we got to the beach the Islamic Republic has these massive public beaches but at least in those days I think a lot of these restrictions by the way have been relaxed but in those days when the revolution still had its fervor and fire they would divide the sea with these sort of curtains creating men, women's separate areas in my case we would always find some secluded area where men and women could bathe together and sure enough we'd always have my parents would have moonshine alcohol and as we were enjoying the beach suddenly you see this Toyota four by four which is the signature vehicle the dark green Toyota four by four is the signature vehicle of Iran's morality police and they drove up and the guy gets out there are two in uniform and one who is not in uniform and the one who doesn't wear uniform is typically like the haji and he's the boss and he immediately grabbed a hot water bottle smelled it and immediately screwed up his face because he knew it was alcohol and started berating my parents and their friends you know it's almost time for your midday prayers and yet your breath smells like a whorehouse what is this and look at you doing this in front of this child and he turned to me and said how old are you and I don't know why but I thought that if I said that I was younger than I was it would sort of ameliorate the situation you know I said I was five I had like pimples coming out and my voice was breaking and the whole situation became so funny that the haji God said okay well if you're having such a good time just give us a little taste and that means that means bribe us so all the men immediately pulled the cash out of their wallet and the guardians of the nation's virtues were on their merry way and so when I got home that day to the villa and I had an argument with my parents or something I went up to the room that I had been assigned and I sort of decided that there is no God if God is just all the sort of rituals of public hypocrisy then there is no God and I am an atheist and it was a sort of electric moment I imagined that you know but maybe like if I said these things and even curse God like there would be demonic creatures who would sort of crawl up from under the floor and drag you down to a nether world and none of that happened in fact I was dragged down into a kind of nether world it just wasn't like the cartoonish version meanwhile I was very proud now you know like every 13 year old who hits upon the idea that there might not be a God in a religious society I thought I was the only one who had thought of this revolutionary idea so I would constantly in every situation try to inject my newfound atheism part of my boldness had to do with the fact that I knew that my uncle in the United States had applied for a green card for us so in a way I was already on my way out and I had watched all these American movies and cartoons and by the way in Iran especially again among my family it wasn't like the R rating didn't mean anything it was like if it's a western film it must be good so like I saw the silence of the lambs far too early but I sort of imagined America as an individualistic super secular something like the Manhattan of taxi driver and that's what I wanted that's where I wanted to be that's where I really belonged and we had this magical green card coming and it eventually did like I said my parents were divorced so I only migrated to the U.S. with my mother and again I had my eyes set on Decadent Manhattan and so we ordered a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight and it takes off okay it makes up one leg and gets us to Amsterdam and we fly across the ocean and I was sitting on the plane and I was expecting to see the map I was following the flight path map which back then they would project at the end of the economy class it was one big monitor and the plane flew right over where I knew like New York was and landed in a place called Minneapolis, St. Paul I didn't, okay but we didn't stop there we then took another plane this one landed in a place called Salt Lake City, Utah and we didn't stop there then my uncle who had got us the family preference visas AKA chain migration picked us up and took us to a town called Eden, Utah and as you were entered the town there was a sign and it said P-O-P-E-600 so I was now at the heart of Mormon country in northern Utah and of course that place at that time still preserved something of what you might say broadly speaking at Judeo-Christian Protestant ethos it's Utah it's a bizarre type of great awakening religion from the 19th century but still has these elements of communitarianism it's definitely not a secular place in fact Mormon seminaries they've somehow figured out they can legally put the seminary almost on school grounds I never know what the First Amendment elements of this but it's legal and beer is capped at 3% alcohol is, coffee is frowned upon and I almost instantly turned my oppositional energies which had been directed against the mullahs of the Islamic Republic against what I thought of as this vaguely Protestant ethos and there was no converting to Mormonism if I'd rejected Islam with all of its especially Shiite Islam with all of its rich iconography and bloody martyrology and the way that it had transmitted classical learning during the Middle Ages, et cetera all this like all the Islamic commentators on Plato Aristotle I sure as hell was not going to convert to a religion that taught that you know the ancient Israelites had come to the Americas attempted to convert the natives failed but left their trials and tribulations on golden tablets which only in the 19th century you know a kind of upstate New York Hockster found and translated using golden magical glasses whatever seeing stone sorry seeing stone I was not gonna believe in that so I you know it only bullied my atheism I'll speed up the story from here the story becomes rather like I said more mundane because you know I like any precocious fresh off the boat 13, 14, 15 year old I would go to bookstores and I one day ran across a book called titled Thus Spokes Arathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche I was in the habit of I'd read it a lot and I knew a lot of $10 words but I didn't always know how to pronounce them so people would ask me how you're feeling and I would say oh a little melancholic and here was the cover of Thus Spokes Arathustra featuring a melancholic looking man with a mustache so long that it covered his mouth entirely and I was already hooked without even having read the book but I did read it and I was of course again electrified by Zarathustra's declaration early in the book that God is dead now all this sort of biblical illusions that are sprinkled throughout Thus Spokes Arathustra went over my head because I hadn't read the Bible but the idea that God is dead means that human beings are not creatures they are not subject to some either natural or supernatural order but they make their own world and they can make what they want of their lives in a radically free and liberated way and that was very attractive but I didn't know what to do with this realization that now we're totally unbound and unattached and could do whatever we want because creatures were no longer subject so but I looked up and as one does on the internet and I learned and also my mother who's read a lot of this stuff and I noticed that a lot of Nietzsche's 20th century heirs had been Marxists and communists so I more from the prestige of that than anything I gravitated toward Marxism and I sort of looked up the only socialist group that didn't seem like it was just a guy in a dank basement in northern Utah and I found and I said I'd like to join and he was probably completely shocked because no one had ever called him on this website and then I gradually I eventually transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle because this group had its headquarters in Seattle so that's the political commitment was serious enough. Now I in Marxism was not looking for what is actually still in some ways useful, right? A picture of what happens after industrialization the way that society divides sharply into classes that are asset owning and those who are a larger majority of people who can only reproduce themselves by their wages. There's something to that that you can encounter Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum as well of the picture of modernity that Pope Leo paints is in some ways pretty similar to the picture that Marx and Engels paint in the Communist Manifesto but what to do about that of course they have they diverge on that but I wasn't interested in that sort of interesting political economic element of dialectical materialism. What I was most interested in was actually the religious aspect. The idea that history has this inevitable direction but it's an imminent movement, right? It's not something that happens from above. The apocalypse doesn't come from a divine forces playing out but rather we make it ourselves through revolution. That is the romance of Marxism. So in short what I'm saying is I was looking in Marxism not for its interesting structural elements which still I think should be paid attention to but to its more sort of pseudo-spiritual secular religion aspect but around the same time around when I was reading this stuff I did have Mormon roommates at some point and they left a we would leave books to try to sort of convert each other. So I would leave them, I would leave you know William S. Burris's extremely obscene naked lunch and they would leave you know their Bibles which included their own 19th century editions but I flipped to the old stuff and I read in one sitting at one point the Gospel of Matthew and what it immediately reminded me of and something that got seared into my mind was the same idea that I had encountered in the martyrology of the Shiites that is someone who lays down his life for his friends and for the truth. It was incredibly moving and it was all the more moving in this case because by its own terms which I didn't believe at the time obviously but one its own terms this person had all the power in the world if he had wanted to he could summon legions of angels to you know kick the butts of his persecutors but he didn't do that but rather allowed himself to be degraded and spat upon and humiliated and scourged and ultimately crucified. This which Pope Benedict calls the great reversal this strange reversal of God becoming weak and vulnerable was gave me the same sort of goosebumps that the story of Imam Hussein did and of course I had never at that point I didn't believe in either of them but as story as myth it touched me in a place that knew philosophy could but then I quickly forgot about it. Eventually after college was over I couldn't know what to do for a while so I learned about this program called Teach for America which places recent college graduates in underserved communities. In my case I was sent to the US-Mexico border into Brownsville, Texas which is the southern most tip of Texas and I became a special education teacher because I stupidly checked a box that said yes I'm willing to be and now bear in mind I had no educational training this is part of Teach for America's promise and peril that it throws ambitious young people into classrooms and forces them to learn to teach so I went from drinking late into the night and shooting the breeze about Hegel to being responsible for people's special education kids at seven in the morning and I was 20 years old by the way I was not even yet legal because I finished college in three years so not because I was a genius just the way the grades are structured in Iran versus the US meant I weirdly skipped the grade anyway but I was not a very good teacher I was a good professional at that point and I quickly learned though that in American public school as a teacher you can get away with a lot if you just talk a big game in faculty meetings by contrast I had a friend who was a roommate he was Israeli-American we both lived together at the same school through Teach for America and he was unbelievably conscientious he would wake up at four in the morning lesson plan show up at the school early to do early tutoring greet each of his students with a firm handshake and a look in the eye and set very high expectations and actually he started to get in trouble because he wouldn't just pass kids automatically he insisted that they actually learn and come for after school tutoring, etc. but meanwhile here I was if you just tell the principal in a meeting just raise your hand and be like well, yeah, we need to adopt more instructional technologies like the principal's like that guy is a star that kid, my goodness whereas my friend who was actually working really hard was coming under parental pressure because they want their kids to move on, etc. and he had had a letter of admission to Harvard Law School and but he had deferred for two years to do his Teach for America placement and so I would ask him, you know, like you may get fired, why don't you just like how are you going to explain to Harvard Law School that you got fired from your Teach for America gig wouldn't that be terrible but he would just say no, I won't pass them because it's not the truth and at the time I sort of was like, wow, you're crazy but over time that insistence on truth, in this case it's a banal truth of whether the kid has learned something or not awakened me to my own conscience, right? I began to compare myself to my roommate and others and felt like I was not as effective as a professional and not ultimately as upright a person as I wanted to be but then I had to ask what is that voice inside you that says that there is something higher to reach for that this persistent voice that points you to do good and then punishes you internally, interiorly when you fail to do that. I began to see my own conscience and as I became conscious of my own conscience and this was a pretty unsettling realization or unsettling encounter. It didn't immediately make me a believer but eventually it would because I had to ask what is it, what is the source of this voice that makes you aware of some universal standard of right and wrong? Where does that, who placed that in us? I had not read C.S. Lewis's Near Christianity at that point but I was sort of stumbling toward his moral proof for the existence of God if you've read Near Christianity at the beginning. He more or less makes that argument that I seem to have an envelope that tells me right and wrong and who gave me that envelope and every other human being seems to have it too and they'll say hey, that's not fair and both of them may disagree about what the substance of fairness is but somehow both of them agree that fairness is something they should aspire to. So I will speed up this story. So I began to also read actual histories of the Soviet Union and of the Chinese experiment with communism and sort of horrified me. I began to become something of a small sea conservative but that's a different story we didn't need to get into. But eventually I found myself working and living in the Northeast and I was working at a charter school that typically recruited Teach for America alumni and I was also working for Teach for America training their new recent recruits. I was a sort of summer principal because I had eventually gotten fairly decent at teaching over those years and that slightly exaggerated. I was like not horrible. But so I was working for Teach for America and in a way professionally I was going from strength to strength. I'm in my early to mid 20s and life is good and you seem to get more and more professional jobs. You get a blackberry. You remember those? And it was great. But occasionally I would sort of drink too much and sort of feel really awful the next day and on one of these occasions I had finished teaching for the week and I was headed to New York for the weekend as part of this training. The others who are the new incoming class of Teach for America core members in New York City and on my way to New York I had to drive to Boston South Station. I had a car accident. I stopped at a red light and then it turned green and I sort of moved forward. I just rolled over my car but I hit a car that was coming the other way and it's probably the worst. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies this moment which seemingly happened in slow motion for me. I noticed that the car that I hit had these letters on the side and it said P-O-L-I-C-E and I slammed into it. And so it turned out that he was in hot pursuit or something and you're supposed to yield to emergency vehicles even if the light is green, but I was too. Anyway, that turned out to be okay but the whole weekend was terrible. I was under my Teach for America bros were like don't worry, we'll just drink through this. We did. And on Sunday when I was supposed to go back to Massachusetts where I, like I said, I was working at, that was my full-time job was in Massachusetts. I was sort of circling along a four block, around a four block radius around Penn Station. Just sort of asking myself what are these o-fish moments, where are you like this and when are you going to change and as it happens there's a Capuchin monastery bizarrely right next to Penn Station and you easily miss it. It has this very modern facade on one side of the building. On the back is more sort of traditionally a church building but on the front is very modern. This kind of alien looking Jesus out front. And I walked in randomly and this is the most providential part of my story. I walked in this kind of despondent hungover state just as one Sunday afternoon mass was about to begin. And I remember, you know, parking myself somewhere in the pews and being intensely moved by the story that was being unfolded in liturgical form in the mass and it was the same idea of someone who is all-powerful undergoing this great reversal where he's punished for my sake. And this was moving beyond words. I try to put it into words in a book called From Fire by Water. My kids appreciate your $2 contribution to their college fund. But I'm looking at the altar I felt and that silence and that declaration on the night he was betrayed. Just sent me into a rapture of tears and what I felt was that there was something very wholly radiating up there and that I don't belong there because I'm very abject and yet it was also radiating for me. That's about what I took away. I didn't know much about Catholic theology, of course, of what actually takes place at the mass. It was mostly at the level of emotion and imagination. Other than that, my only encounters with Catholicism had to do, of course, my mother was an artist so I knew something about the church's sacred art tradition. I had this vague sense that Catholicism is the most prestigious branch of Christianity because it's the oldest, continuous one. And I had seen the baptism seen in the godfather, Paternoste, Cuiessencelli, shoot your enemy in the eye. That was about it. But then as I was walking out, I stopped in the vestibule of the church. I had composed myself so I didn't look like a blubbering idiot and all the other parishioners and attendees had walked out and shook the friar's hand. So it was just me and I sort of went up and looked at a picture of the reigning pontiff which typically hangs in the vestibule of the church as you well know. And looking at the time, Pope Benedict, that also sent me to another rapture of tears and the friar must have known that I was a little bit in a weird place so he came up to me but he said the most obnoxious thing. He said, you know son, that's not God. I know, I know, and I just sort of couldn't answer him and I walked out and that was it. But over time I began to read, I then started to read more and more by then after this Teach for America stint and my whole misbegotten adventure in becoming a school teacher. I went to law school. I never became a lawyer. I went to work for the Wall Street Journal editorial page and then was soon shipped to London to run the European edition, helped run the European edition of the Wall Street Journal which no longer exists. It's now been all, it's one global edition. But at the time there was something called Wall Street Journal Europe. And you know again like life is very good. I seem to be going from strength to strength but now the questions that still not me are there and I find them sometimes confronted to me by others where people ask, you know, what do you believe religiously often including in the job interview for the journal or in parties and so forth. And interiorly I was becoming just aware that I had been blessed with this gift of faith but I was ashamed to own it because I thought that remember religion is for sort of provincial saps and so I would say things like, you know, this stuff is very beautiful. You know, it's been a civilizing influence on the world, hasn't it? Like Caravaggio is lovely. But interiorly I was starting to believe to my own shock. I then picked up a book called Jesus of Nazareth. I was a trilogy kind of, I picked it up coinciding around that time or a little after Pope Benedict's visit to the United States and it's his attempt as he puts it to discover the face of the Lord himself and it's this magnificent work of scriptural theology. As for starters, what it did for me was utterly humble me because I had always this idea that ideas that are newest are best. And so like that, you know, Plato might have been interesting 2,500 years ago and Christianity might have made it some contributions 500 years later roughly, you know, and then da-da-da-da and then what comes later and ever more chronologically forward to our own time must be most correct or must be most true. And the people who still cling to older ideas must be, you know, backward. And then you read Pope Benedict and the sort of the sheer learning, his engagement with modern philosophy, et cetera, humbles you and this is gonna sound like a stupid thing to say and it is a stupid thing to say but I was kind of stupid then was that I was like, oh, religion isn't just for like, you know, the needy and the weak and the provincial and it's like really, you know, you can be intelligent and believe that was all, you know, I sort of took away from it. Well, not all. The other was he began to explain that the two big books of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament actually tell one cohesive story. And in fact, in a way that the Old Testament doesn't make sense unless it's fulfilled in the New and that story is ultimately God's ever deeper disclosure of himself in that great reversal that I had found so moving, right? The first in encountering a shadow of it in Shiite Islam, then encountering it in the Gospel of Matthew and then ultimately at these occasional moments when I would go to the mass in points of crisis in life, that's the story of the Bible is God drawing ever near and humbling himself for abject humanity. So that was very powerful and simultaneously I started reading this very beautiful translation of the Torah by Robert Alter. And I would, I began in a way that's very hard to explain to here in the story of the fall, for example, and that sort of transgression in the Bible and what followed it. The most coherent account of the brokenness both in me and the brokenness I witnessed in the world outside. And I heard this voice already. I had heard this voice throughout my life. You know, what have you done? What have you done? Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. I hadn't murdered anyone, the idea that there is this voice inside you again, it's conscience that points you to a universal law and then therefore indicts you, I had already encountered. And so to hear in the Bible or to read it in the Torah was quite powerful and I could say that at that point I began to be a believer and not to be ashamed to say that I'm some sort of believer. Meanwhile, the journal has shipped me off to London and I was to explore, among other things, around then was the 2015-16 European migrant crisis and I embedded with a group of migrants even living in Istanbul in a migrant safe house because I spoke Persian and I was a native Iranian and I could pretend to be an actual migrant. So I did this very foolish thing. It was like, by the way, around that point I had gotten married, I don't get into that story, but it was the last time I told my wife, I'm gonna do something really crazy and bear with me. I'm gonna buy a life jacket in London, a nice one, not the kind that the migrants actually use, put it in my backpack, join a migrant I had met on Facebook. He was coming from Iran. He was a real migrant. I was actually flying into Istanbul and I would pretend to be his relative or friend and we would go through the process of, as you'll remember, the path of the migrants. They go through Western's Turkey, sorry, Turkey's Western shore, through the Aegean Sea up to Greece and then walk all the way. And I did this journey not in a straightforward way, but through these kind of reporting trips, I sort of did the whole thing. And the migrant safe house was basically, I got a foretaste of hell. Not only because there were cockroaches everywhere all the time, like hundreds of cockroaches. I think you'd be on your food and everything, but also the violence that broke out among the migrants. I'm not making a policy argument here. I happen to have my views of what should have been done around the migrant crisis, but just that it was a picture of, an external picture of my own sense of internal objection such that when I got back to London, I wanted to write up this story, obviously journalistically, but I also immediately thought I need to join a church. I need God. And at the time I had this friend who was an evangelical Anglican who advocated for persecuted Christians in the Middle East so we were good friends. And he was a source for me as a journalist, et cetera. And he said, go to this church called Holy Trinity Brompton, which is probably the most prestigious, powerful evangelical institution in Britain. A kind of rock star church with rock star status. And I did, I did go for a while, but ultimately I was left somewhat dissatisfied. And the strange thing is that although there was a lot, a lot of outward emotion and singing and dancing and stuff, that was, in a way I was like, I was into it. I wasn't that snobbish in some ways, I tried to get into it. Ultimately it was actually very, very abstract, right? All you have is the Bible and the written word and there's, there are no other points of contact between man and God and in that kind of evangelicalism. But as it happens, right next door to Holy Trinity Brompton is another church called the London Oratory, which I would walk by all the time. And one day I noticed they had said, solemn mass at 11 a.m. And already having gone through the evangelical service, I then walked into this very, this Neo-Borac church and went through a mass, which was in Latin, although I did not know the distinction between the two forums. This was actually just a, the new mass, just done in very, it was done in Latin and very reverent and all the impressions and powerful sources of sort of divine inspiration in the imagination, political thinking, philosophical thinking, but also like I said, emotion and imagination, all these threads came together at the mass, both the moving element of what happens, the sacrifice up there, what happens on the altar, but then also the sense of continuity, authority, order, millennial institution that the Catholic Church represents, the perfect, as I call it, the sort of perfect harmony between grace and order is Catholicism for me, grace and order together. And such that by the end of that mass, I decided to become a Roman Catholic right away. And I went to the Oratory House, which is basically the, where the priests live and so forth. And I knocked on the door and this wise and old English priest with wire rim glasses opened the door. He had the most posh accent, which I won't imitate, but he was sort of just like, well, how can I help you? And I said, I wanna become a Roman Catholic. And he didn't miss a beat. He said, very well, I shall instruct you. And we would meet once a day, sorry, once a week, every Sunday. We would meet once a Sunday and it was really wonderful, just an hour of conversation. And then I was receiving to the church on December 19, 2016. Yeah, I won't forget, and oh, thank you. Oh, please don't clap for me at that point. It's not my achievement, believe me. And I haven't sinned ever since. No, I'm just kidding. Thank you very much. Peace out.