Berkley Center

E.J. Dionne is a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center, University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture teaching in Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and Government Department, and a leading scholar and commentator on religion in U.S. politics. In addition, since fall 2017 he has been William H. Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Kennedy School. The W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, Dionne writes a column for the Washington Post that is syndicated in over 200 outlets nationally and abroad. His books include One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (2017, with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann); Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism: From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond (2016); Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012); Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008); Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004); They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era (1996); and Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.

Rick Perlstein is a journalist and author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014). He previously published Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. A contributing writer at the Nation, former chief national correspondent for the Village Voice, and a former online columnist for the New Republic and Rolling Stone, his journalism and essays have appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, and many other publications.