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.

Christian Wiman is a poet and senior lecturer in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in Yale’s Divinity School. He is the author of four books of poetry: Once In the West (2014), Every Riven Thing (2010), Hard Night (2005), and The Long Home (1998); a collection of essays, Ambition and Survival: On Becoming a Poet (2007); and a memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013). His translations of Osip Mendelstam are collected in Stolen Air (2012). From 2003 until 2013 Wiman was the editor of Poetry magazine, the premier magazine for poetry in the English-speaking world. During that time the magazine’s circulation tripled, and it garnered two National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors. He is a recipient of both the Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships. A native of West Texas, Wiman graduated from Washington and Lee University.