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The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hello, I am Lamona Ash and I am the author of Divine Comedy, the stand-up double act who turned to the priesthood, which was originally published in 2022.

What drew me to the story was curiosity and complete ignorance. So for me, a story about Christianity, about young

people converting to Christianity today, seemed so alien and impossibly distant from the kind of

life that I seem to be living in my mid-20s, that I just thought, well, if anything else,

at least that would just be fascinating.

So when I first started interviewing them, I knew nothing about the subject.

It was really one of those ones where each new piece of information about what it's like to become a Christian,

all the different aspects of that, both the places that you go to, the churches you visit,

the prayers that you learn, the hymns you sing, the reading of the Bible, it was all new to me and I think

that made it such an exciting piece to get to write. What has changed since the article came out?

The answer is sort of everything because I've spent the last three years after writing that piece

interviewing so many other converts to all these different parts of Christianity.

And during that process, I became so much more immersed in the Christian faith than I'd ever anticipated.

And it meant that, and this was already happening whilst I was writing that piece,

it was this movement from skepticism slash ignorance towards real interest and empathy and also a curiosity

that also made me wonder if Christianity was not something that I wanted to get involved in

as well, that I wondered if anyone can convert and I was meeting so many young people who were.

Maybe I could too.

And then I suppose it means that all the questions I now know so much more about Christianity

or its denominations, all its different flavors, its history than I did when I was writing that piece.

...