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.

Eliza Griswold is an American journalist, poet, and long-form nonfiction writer who is director of the Humanities Council's Program in Journalism and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Her newest book is Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (2024). Among her other works are Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America (2018), which was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2010). She has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker for more than two decades.