Accompanied by disillusionment with the new atheists, whom she was expected to join (once she had shed the Catholic faith her mother adopted during her childhood but later abandoned). From the National Catholic Register:
During her grandmother’s long illness, Keynes explains that she “returned to the Rosary during those long hours at her bedside and was reminded of the redemptive power of Christ’s suffering. I apprehended a theological underpinning to the question of suffering. Seeing death made me question the spirit: what it is, where it comes from, where it goes. So by this point, I was developing a spiritual awareness, but hadn’t made the step back to the Catholic Church. That step came after much reflection and reading.”
And encounters with new atheists?:
“One of the things that made me wary of ‘new atheism’ was the strange mix of angry emotion I encountered there: anger at the thought of God; anger at any restrictions on behavior; anger at thwarted will; pride in the exertion of will; pride in feeling intellectually superior; contempt for anyone who reveals human vulnerability in asking for the grace of God. It’s important to remember that where there’s anger, there’s often pain. I see a lot of pain there. I think it stems from clinging to the idea that we’re in control, that we have autonomy.
“All we can do is be sensitive to the anger and note that it’s odd for people who value reason so highly to make such large concessions to emotion,” she continues.
Well, she is certainly an improvement on Darwin’s granddaughter Frances Cornwell:
A friend references a poem Cornwell wrote (while comfortably seated in a train), making fun of a rural passerby:
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, …
to which G. K. Chesterton riposted:
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?
– “The Fat White Woman Speaks”
Curiously, Chesterton was one of the best-known popular Catholic writers of the early twentieth century, and a resolute anti-Darwinian.