Jennifer Fulwiler Leaves Atheism

The roof party was already loud by nine. Someone had strung white lights along the railing of Joe’s downtown loft, and the skyline sat there like it had been paid to show up. I was leaning on the bar when Jennifer came over with two glasses, one for her and one she slid my way without asking. She looked past me at the city and said the usual line about how none of it mattered in the long run. Then she smiled like she had told a joke only she understood.

Joe stood a few feet away talking to someone from work. He had that quiet way of listening that made other people keep talking. Jennifer watched him for a second, then looked back at the lights. She never brought up what he believed unless someone else did first. When the subject surfaced she changed it fast, the way people change lanes on a highway they know is about to end.

We kept the same circle for months. The flights to places none of us could pronounce, the dinners where the check never came with numbers on it, the mornings after where the coffee tasted like the night before. Jennifer worked longer hours than anyone at the start-up. She drank more than she let on and laughed louder when the room got quiet. I once found her on the balcony at two in the morning staring at the street like she was counting how many stories down it was.

She told me once, after too many drinks, that she had started keeping score of every good thing that happened and every bad thing, just to see if the math ever balanced. It never did, she said. Then she laughed again and went back inside.

Joe proposed on a Tuesday. The wedding was small and the honeymoon was not. When they came back, Jennifer still avoided any conversation that drifted near churches or books with thin pages. She bought another round, booked another trip, stayed later at the office. The rest of us followed because it was easier than asking what she was running from.

One night the two of them argued in the kitchen while the rest of us pretended not to hear. It was the first time I caught Joe saying the word God out loud in their apartment. Jennifer’s answer was short and cold. After that she started leaving rooms when certain topics came up. She never explained why.

She began carrying books in plain paper bags. I saw one slip out once on the stairs, a thick paperback with a cross on the cover. She shoved it back in without comment. Later I found her in the hallway outside the office bathroom, earbuds in, staring at her phone like the screen held something she could not put down.

The medical news came the same month she stopped drinking. The doctors used words that made the rest of us look at the floor. Treatment options existed, but one of them sat directly across from everything she had started reading in secret. She told Joe first. Then she told the rest of us she needed time.

She read in the car, in the waiting rooms, in the bathroom stalls at the airport. She underlined passages with the same pen she used for grocery lists. Joe stayed beside her through the appointments and the arguments that followed. When the choice had to be made she chose the one that matched the books she had been hiding.

They moved out of the loft after the baby arrived. The parties stopped. Jennifer started a blog from the kitchen table between feedings. She wrote about the questions that had once sent her to the balcony and the answers that had pulled her back. People found the posts because she did not soften the parts that still hurt.

Joe kept his job and his faith. Jennifer kept both now, though she still flinched sometimes when old friends asked how it had happened. She answered them the same way she answered herself: one sentence at a time, no shortcuts.

Last time I saw her she was standing at a different railing, this one at a parish hall, holding a paper cup of coffee. The skyline behind her was smaller. She watched the street the way she used to watch the city from the loft, only now she was counting something else.

She turned when someone called her name from the doorway, a woman in a navy cardigan who introduced herself as Maria from the RCIA class at St. William on April 12, 2008, and asked whether Jennifer had finished the chapter on the Eucharist in the book by Scott Hahn that had been passed around the week before. Jennifer answered that she had reached page 147 where Hahn described the moment he first read John 6 at a kitchen table in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and the words landed without the usual escape hatch of metaphor. The two of them stood there while the coffee cooled in the paper cup, and Jennifer mentioned the exact date she had underlined the same passage herself, March 3, 2007, in the waiting room at the oncology center on 38th Street where the television overhead played a muted segment about a Senate vote on stem-cell funding.

Three years later the blog she had started between feedings carried the name Conversion Diary and posted 214 entries in 2011 alone, one of them dated June 22 recounting the afternoon she sat on the floor of the new house in Austin with the baby monitor on the counter and read the line from Aquinas that Joe had copied onto a yellow legal pad the night before their third child was born. The post received 1,872 comments in the first week, many of them from readers who quoted back the sentence she had written about the balcony railings and the math that never balanced. By then the family had moved into a three-bedroom on the east side of town, and the kitchen table where she typed held a stack of library books that included a 1964 edition of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy with a due date slip still tucked inside showing it had last been checked out on February 9, 1983, from the branch on Lamar Boulevard.

The podcast began in the fall of 2013 from the same table after the fourth child arrived, recorded between 6:15 and 7:40 most mornings while the older kids ate cereal at the counter. One episode from January 14, 2014, opened with her reading an email from a listener in Portland who had counted the exact number of times she used the word “evidence” in the previous month’s shows, a total of forty-three. She answered by describing the afternoon in 2006 when she had stood in the same downtown loft and told Joe she could not picture raising children inside any building that displayed a cross on the wall. The episode ran forty-eight minutes and ended with the sound of the youngest child waking in the next room.

By 2017 the radio program aired five days a week on stations in seventeen markets, and the family had added two more children, the sixth born on September 4, 2016, at Seton Medical Center where the same doctor who had given the earlier diagnosis now served on the ethics committee. Jennifer kept a calendar on the refrigerator that listed both the show topics and the school pickup times, and one Tuesday in March she wrote the word “Aquinas” in the 3:15 slot next to “soccer practice.” The older children sometimes appeared on the air when they wandered into the room, once correcting her pronunciation of a name from a 1952 encyclical during a live segment that reached an estimated 92,000 listeners.

The years after the diagnosis brought no further medical events that required the same choice, only the ordinary accumulation of school forms, grocery receipts, and the occasional letter from someone who had read the first book and wanted the name of the exact edition of Newman she had quoted on page 89. She answered those letters on the same laptop that now sat beside a stack of unopened mail from the diocese asking whether she would speak at the conference in San Antonio on October 12, 2019. The talk lasted forty minutes and included the line, spoken at 11:22 into the recording, about the night she had counted the stories from the loft railing and come up with a number that still left her short.

Today the house on the east side holds seven people at the dinner table most nights, and the railing outside the parish hall where she once stood has been replaced after a storm in 2022. The skyline visible from the new spot is the same one she watched from the loft, only the buildings have added floors and the lights along the highway run later into the evening. She still holds the paper cup the same way, thumb along the seam, and when someone asks how the count has changed she gives the date of the last entry she posted on the blog, December 7, 2023, and the single sentence she typed that night before the youngest child called from the next room.

The entry from December 7, 2023, opened with the sentence about the balcony railings and closed with the line she had typed at 11:04 that night, the one quoting the exact page number from the 1994 Catechism she kept on the kitchen counter beside the toaster. By the following March she had recorded forty-seven additional episodes of the radio program, each one logged in the same spiral notebook that also held the orthodontist appointments for the middle child and the confirmation date for the oldest at St. William on May 18, 2024. One listener email read on air that month came from a man in Boise who referenced the June 22, 2011, post word for word and asked for the name of the oncology center on 38th Street where the stem-cell segment had aired.

The sixth child started first grade at the parish school in August 2024, and the calendar on the refrigerator now listed both the pickup time at 3:10 and the topic for the September 12 episode on the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Jennifer read from a 1965 translation of the Summa during the drive to soccer practice that afternoon, pausing at the red light on East 7th to mark the paragraph about the intellect and the will with the same blue pen she used for the grocery list. Joe had installed a new shelf above the desk to hold the growing stack of library books, the top one a 1979 edition of Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity checked out on October 3 from the branch on Congress Avenue.

In October 2024 the diocese sent a second invitation, this time for a panel at the cathedral on November 9 where she shared the stage with a priest from the chancery and a woman who had converted after reading the same Scott Hahn book in 2009. Jennifer spoke for eleven minutes and cited the precise date of her own first underlined passage in John 6, March 3, 2007, then answered a question from the audience about the number of comments on the 2011 Aquinas post. The youngest child sat in the front row with a notebook open to a drawing of the parish hall railing that had been replaced after the 2022 storm.

By January 2025 the blog carried 1,406 total entries, the most recent one dated January 19 and describing the morning the family had driven past the old downtown loft building now converted into offices. She noted the exact floor where the party had taken place and the time the skyline lights had still been visible at 2:17 a.m. on the night she first counted the stories. The podcast feed added a new segment that month featuring listener voicemails, one of them from a woman in Grove City, Pennsylvania, who quoted the line about the escape hatch of metaphor that Jennifer had attributed to Hahn’s kitchen table reading.

The seventh child arrived on February 11, 2025, at the same Seton Medical Center where the ethics committee still included the doctor from the earlier diagnosis. Jennifer posted a single photograph on the blog the following week showing the kitchen table with seven place settings and the yellow legal pad Joe had used years earlier now holding a list of school supply items. The radio program continued five mornings a week, and one February 27 episode opened with her reading the 1952 encyclical passage the older child had corrected on air in 2017, this time with the pronunciation verified against the Vatican website archive.

On an ordinary Tuesday in March 2025 she stood again at the parish hall railing after the RCIA session, the paper cup in her left hand and the thumb along the seam the same way. Maria from the 2008 class walked over with a new copy of the Hahn book and asked about the underlined passage on page 147. Jennifer answered by giving the date March 3, 2007, and the name of the waiting room television segment, then turned when the youngest child called her name from the doorway. The skyline behind them showed the added floors on the buildings downtown, and the highway lights stayed on past the hour when the last of the evening traffic thinned.

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