Paul Elie
Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs
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.
International activities include:
- Author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003), a group portrait of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, and Reinventing Bach (2012), a group portrait of modern musicians who rendered the music of J.S. Bach in fresh and profound ways by making use of new technology. Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists.
- Served as senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
