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.

James Wood has been a staff writer and literary critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He is also a visiting Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He previously was the chief literary critic at the Guardian from 1992 to 1995 and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. Wood is the author of three essay collections: The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (2012), The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and The Novel (2004), and The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999). He has also written a novel, The Book Against God (2003), and a work of criticism, How Fiction Works (2008). He won a National Magazine Award in 2008 for his criticism in The New Yorker. Wood earned his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University.