Raised Catholic like Rice, I long ago rejected that religion as my own moral compass. I keep my halting relationship with God a private affair, but I never feel farther from him than when I'm listening to the repetitive liturgy of mass.

Yet shrinks will tell you that the unhappiest people are those conflicted between believing and disavowing God, no doubt due to the heavy wear from the internal churning for some sign, some proof that, yes, there’s a God and everything will be all right.

This, while knowing that their lack of faith might mask the petulance of a spoiled child, peeved at not getting what it wants.

And so, like a good agnostic, I constantly scan the horizon for the evidence that will deliver me, which is how I came upon Rice's evangelic essay.

"On the afternoon in 1998 when faith returned…I saw, in one enduring moment, that the God who could make the Double Helix and the snow flake, the God who could make the Black holes in space, and the lilies of the field, could do absolutely anything and must know everything -- why good people suffer, why genocide and war plague our planet, and why Christians have lost…so much credibility as people who know how to love.”

Rice’s passion for Christ was unyielding. She knew. And so I mentally stashed her essay away in the ‘pro’ file, only to revisit it this week when the author noisily renounced Christianity. And I couldn't help but note that her earlier misgivings about Christians' "credibility" proved prescient.

”Today I quit being a Christian,” she wrote on her Facebook page Wednesday. “ ... It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.”

She continued, "I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life."

In an interview this week, Rice revealed that she had been wrestling with her commitment to the Catholic Church the last three years because of its sex abuse scandals and the excommunication of a nun who approved an abortion on a woman whose life was threatened. "I came to the conclusion that if I didn't make this declaration,” she said, “I was going to lose my mind."

And with those words, the writer famous for vampires and her faith in Christ moves closer to sanity. And in doing so, gives me another reason to believe.