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Paul Elie

Senior Fellow

Latest Updates

August 18, 2025

Paul Elie's New Book Featured in Reviews and Public Conversations

Senior Fellow Paul Elie has received wide attention for his new book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s (2025). Reviews in the Financial Times and National Catholic Reporter have highlighted the book's timely exploration of art, religion, and culture in the 1980s. In addition, Elie has spoken about his work with the American Writers Museum, Christianity Today, and New Orleans Public Radio, among others. 

Profile

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.

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