In Jersey City, where 22 new condos are nearly complete at "m650 Flats," a five-story conversion of a century-old structure, six units have sold in three months (three of them to members of the Carrino family, which owns Brunelleschi Construction, the building developer).
And as for the sublimity of belief, there's also a sublimity of skepticism — as seen in the cosmic comedy of Philip Roth's early story "The Conversion of the Jews" (in the collection "Goodbye, Columbus").
I'm reminded of another Jewish kid who leveraged an outsider's knowledge of Christian lore into a radical twist on tradition: the thirteen-year-old Ozzie from the twenty-three-year-old Philip Roth's story "The Conversion of the Jews".
But Grace, long alienated from her Catholic roots, takes the preachings of Father Timothy Tim Kazurinskyy) and the lessons of Bible study (led by a young woman played by Sophie Traub) literally, with outrageous results that suggest a Catholic counterpart to Philip Roth's gleefully impious short story "The Conversion of the Jews".
Another legend tells the story of conversion of Chamunda into a Jain goddess.
Then came the biggest day yet in the Boris Bus story, the full conversion of an entire London route.
Elsewhere, unfamiliar personalities are brought vividly into view, as in Katy Grannan's spare portrait of Megan Phelps-Roper, whose astonishing story of conversion by Twitter Adrian Chen wrote about recently in his story "Unfollow".
Stories of forced conversion of Hindu women at the hands of Muslim zealots have caused media scandals; last year some Hindu families, complaining of prejudice, left for India.
A prime example of superficiality at its most rewarding: the Trump International Hotel & Tower, a fifty-two-story hotel-condominium conversion of the former Gulf & Western Building, on Columbus Circle, which opened last January.
"We are doing a 12-story 43-unit conversion of a loft building at 49 East 21st Street, and we decided that 49 East 21st Street rolls off the tongue well".
"The story of conversion is a classic tale".
