 As a result, I share something with each group while lacking something each enjoys. Like other converts, I did not recite Hail Marys as a child or experience the church as a deep ancestral inheritance bound up with blood and class and ethnic patrimony. Instead, I made an intellectualized religious choice, reading the books that converts tend to read and deciding things that they decide, choosing Catholicism because its claims were more convincing than the Protestant churches of my youth."