Thank God! Thank God!

im an anglo-catholic in the US. i was raised irreligious, and in my search for a faith, i formally converted to judaism in 2019, before being baptized and confirmed in the episcopal church in 2025. i attend an anglo-catholic parish (where i altar serve (yay!)) im also a member of the society of mary, and am discerning a vocation to a dispersed religious order :)

im a strong proponent of inclusive orthodoxy, and fully affirm the participation of women and lgbt+ people in every sacrament of the church. i also affirm the historic creeds.

as an anglo-catholic i maintain some devotions as a matter of personal piety that the larger anglican communion doesn’t require. i have a special love for the sacred heart of jesus, st. paul the apostle, and st. michael the archangel. my baptismal saint was julian of norwich, and my confirmation saint was thomas the apostle.

in my daily life, im a phd student in english literature (talk to me about t.s. eliot).

im always looking for other christians to follow/talk to! feel free to dm me :) also always open to prayer requests.

(i will not be following minors or christopagans as a personal preference.)

I want to preface things by saying that there are things that I will always keep with me from my past, and I have only immense love and respect for Judaism. I’m going to try to not make super direct comparisons between my experience of each as a religion because I don’t at all want to seem like I’m negging Judaism or to make it seem like a stepping stone to Christianity-–I do think that it was what I needed as a very young person who was scared of religion as a whole.

I was raised nonreligiously and without any religious education. I became interested in Judaism at 16 after reading a book in school, and started to go to a reform synagogue the next year. Christianity was never an option in my mind. I had been a sort of embarrassing atheist, and was still incredibly antagonistic toward Christianity as a whole (“death cult” did come out of my mouth—Lord have mercy). Above all, I believed that Judaism made the most logical sense out of any tradition that I’d looked into, and that the claims expressed by the Christians that I’d known were incoherent (the only Christians in my extended family were evangelical and I’d only had bad experiences). I’ve always been guilty of trying to intellectualize faith, and I’m grateful that the tradition that I’m in now both allows for that intellectualization in its long history of theology and tradition but also evades it, forcing me to accept mystery. 

I formally completed my conversion to Judaism at 20, and I do think that after that I always had the sense that something was missing for me. At the time I thought that it might be the nagging desire to have converted orthodox (an impossibility, as I identified as trans masc at the time), or just a manifestation of my OCD. There was one instance that I remember, though, sitting on my floor, begging God to just show me if he had a Son. I quickly swept that thought away, feeling guilty for thinking it.

After college, I moved away from my hometown and started grad school at a Catholic institution, where it felt like Christ was inescapable (crucifixes in every classroom, a statue of Our Lady that said “Behold Thy Mother” at the base, church bells ringing throughout the day). One summer, I read the New Testament for the first time, after being frustrated by missing religious allusions in poetry I was studying. It took me twelve days to read, taking up all of my free time, and I thought “Oh, no. This is true." And I tried very hard to fight off the knowledge that God became man. The Incarnation changed everything for me. It was unspeakably beautiful, and I was horrified. I felt like I was “betraying” Judaism, and I was scared of Christians, and it took me several months from that moment to step into a church.