from faith to apostasy and back again

From Janie Cheaney in World on "A.N. Wilson's account of a journey to atheism and back"...

Wilson's spiritual journey has been as lively as his professional one. Raised Anglican, he began his college career with ordination in mind but soon drifted to Anglo-Catholicism, then Roman Catholicism, then back to the Church of England. In the early '90s, he underwent what he later described as a "conversion experience" and renounced belief altogether.

He describes his early days as an atheist as exhilarating: "For months, I walked on air."...

While writing Lewis' biography he noticed similarities between himself and his subject...Just as Lewis gradually became aware that his favorite authors were Christians (odd, that), Wilson noticed a difference between the skeptical and the devout: "Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?" The perception of his atheist friends seemed rather parochial and flat. And phenomena lurking outside a strict materialist system gave him pause: How did materialism account for music, or human language, or love?

Such mysteries finally convinced Wilson that "we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true..."