On the day before Easter, Benjamin Kohler did something he never thought he'd do. He shed his old religion and embraced a new one: Catholicism.

During confirmation rites at Old St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Philadelphia, he joined in the Eucharist. "The intensity of it," he said, was "pretty overwhelming."

Kohler, 25, was raised Methodist, though in a family of Christmas-and-Easter Christians, he says. He grew up believing in God, but during church services, "I never really felt anything - it was just words."

In 2003, in his second year at Temple University's Beasley School of Law, he traveled to Rome for foreign study. His residence was near the Vatican, so he visited St. Peter's Basilica. It was then, he says, he had a life-altering experience: a surety that something was out there in the universe, something moving in him and through him.

"It was" - he pauses - "a presence."

He had not been searching, for God or religion. He had particularly disliked Catholicism for its reliance on ritual.

His sense of spiritual awakening stayed with him after his return home. He spent almost a year thinking about it, then started going to Mass. When he told the Rev. Mark Horak at Old St. Joe's about his experience, the pastor replied, "It will be interesting to see what plans God has for you."

Since graduating in May 2005, he commutes to Bethlehem, where he is a clerk for a Superior Court judge. He recognizes that the teachings of his new faith differ from the laws of the land on issues such as abortion and the death penalty.

That conflict presents a challenge, he says, but also an opportunity to consider old topics anew, to apply a religious framework to his thinking where once he applied only the secular.

After his confirmation, he said, "I felt an intensely tangible sense of inner peace - and of unlimited possibility. I've no doubt in my mind that I made the right decision."

- Jeff Gammage