Iron & Incense: A Tattooed Choreographer's Road from Agnostic to Catholic | Sips With Serra

He's covered in tattoos — face, neck, hands — came up in pop-punk and hip-hop, and choreographs competitive dance for a living. He's also one of the most thoughtful young converts you'll meet. In this episode of Sips With Serra, Ryan (better known online as Iron & Incense) sits down to tell the story of how a "who really knows?" agnostic talked his way into the Catholic Church — not through a big emotional moment, but through history, philosophy, and questions he couldn't argue his way out of.

We get into why he always thought hard atheism was an "arrogant" position, how a search for new music accidentally introduced him to Christian thinkers, and the realization that science was born from a Christian worldview rather than opposed to it. From there it turns personal: church-shopping from a Pentecostal service to his first reverent Mass, the priest who told this on-fire convert to slow down, and being met with "nothing but love" despite the tattoos. He's candid about the cost, too — the sins he actually had to fight after converting, living with his girlfriend while staying in close contact with his priest, and why his life got noticeably harder and yet far happier.

Along the way: the "nonchalant" culture that's afraid to care about anything, why disagreement is the foundation of real friendship, the Litany of Humility, and his mission to show that Catholicism — and masculinity — aren't a costume you put on. "You are a Catholic man or you are not. Your fruits will show, not your looks."

📚 STUDIES MENTIONED
Happiness — religious vs. non-religious (Pew Research Center, global study):
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/01/31/religions-relationship-to-happiness-civic-engagement-and-health-around-the-world/

Religious service attendance & lower divorce risk (~50% lower; Harvard Human Flourishing Program / VanderWeele, Nurses' Health Study — controls for the "people contemplating divorce stop attending" objection):
https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/religion-and-divorce
Full study (PLOS ONE): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207778

Cohabiting before marriage & higher odds of divorce (Rosenfeld & Roesler, 2018; via Institute for Family Studies):
https://ifstudies.org/blog/premarital-cohabitation-is-still-associated-with-greater-odds-of-divorce

Number of premarital sexual partners & divorce risk (Nicholas Wolfinger, Institute for Family Studies; lowest risk among those who wait):
https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
Peer-reviewed: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0192513X231155673

A father's churchgoing & whether kids keep the faith (1994 Swiss study, Haug & Warner — widely cited, but note it's older and methodologically debated):
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-05-024-v

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