Berkley Center

Paul Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs,and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is the author of two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: Music, Technology, and the Search for Transcendence (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, as well as dozens of essays, articles, reviews, and prefaces for the New York Times and its Book Review and Sunday magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Commonweal, as well as the New Yorker. His third book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in May 2025.

Richard Rodriguez is an author and a journalist. He is most widely known for his autobiographical trilogy on class, ethnicity, and race: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). His most recent book is Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013). Rodriguez worked as an essayist for nearly twenty years on the PBS NewsHour and has written documentaries for British and American television.