Senior Fellow
May 8, 2026
In a New Yorker essay, Berkley Center Senior Fellow Paul Elie reflects on Robert Prevost's first year as Leo XIV—a year in which the first American pope stepped into history the way John Paul II did when he went to Communist Poland in 1979.
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.
He spent 15 years as a senior editor with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. At Georgetown, he is the curator of the Faith and Culture Series, hosted by the Office of the President, and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps. He is a friend of the Community of Sant'Egidio, a relationship developed across 30 trips to Rome, and has contributed afterwords to Mario Marazziti's 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty (2015) and Roberto Morozzo della Rocca's Sant'Egidio's Dream (2023). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
