On Holding Multiple Identities
I have lived, across the course of a single life, inside more identities than most institutions are comfortable acknowledging in a single person.
I was born Jewish, into a family that observed the traditions with a seriousness that shaped everything I would later become. I became, through philosophical inquiry, an atheist – not casually, but rigorously, as a consequence of the questions I was asking and the answers I was finding. I became, through a process I can describe but not fully explain, a Catholic, and eventually a Carmelite nun. I was, throughout all of this, a philosopher – a student of Husserl, a scholar of phenomenology, a thinker who could not stop thinking even when thinking led to places that were inconvenient for the identities I inhabited.