Berkley Center

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.

Ron Hansen is Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor at Santa Clara University, where he has taught since 1996. He taught at University of California, Santa Cruz from 1989 to 1996, and prior to that held numerous visiting appointments at institutions including the State University of New York, Binghamton, University of Nebraska, University of Arizona, University of Iowa, and Cornell University. He also held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He is the author of several novels, including A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (2011), Exiles (2008), and Hitler's Niece (1999), as well as collections of stories, including She Loves Me Not (2012) and You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe (1994, edited with Jim Shepard). Hansen holds a B.A. from Creighton University, M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and M.A. from Santa Clara University.