Paul Elie

What drew you to Georgetown?
I met President DeGioia on the room of the Hotel Minerva in Rome. I was reporting a story about the papacy, and one of my sources took me to a party there, and it turned out [DeGioia] had given my book, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” to the board of trustees as a Christmas gift. So he said, “Come and do something with us at Georgetown.” I came to lead the Faith and Culture series, and it’s gone wonderfully. I had a chance to join the university as a faculty member and research fellow at the Berkley Center, keeping my ties up in New York where so much of publishing and journalism happens. All my work is really about how literature and the arts are a place where you can go to find out about everything else, whether it’s religion or current affairs, so that’s not usually represented institutionally so well. To use literature and the arts as a point of entry for the discussions we’re having at Georgetown, it’s a dream job.

What drew you to religion as a subject?
I was an English major, philosophy minor. I’m essentially a literary writer, at a time when it’s so difficult to talk about the religious questions, the culture wars, et cetera, taking a look at literature is a way to have the conversation in different ways. I wrote a piece that was published on the cover of the Times Book Review called, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” That’s the kind of piece, that assimilated 10 years of reading of mine, 20 years, that can pull it all together and suddenly people are having the conversation with you. So it was essentially a literary approach, but suddenly we can look at religious belief through literature and through music.

How does your own relationship with faith influence your writing?
I’m a Catholic, that’s my background. But my experience is that I didn’t have a good idea of what that meant until I encountered some remarkable writers — Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. It was through literature that I figured out what’s at stake here, which is how are we supposed to live our lives? We’ve got one, what are we supposed to do with it? How do we tie it to the past, how do we move a narrative forward to the future? I came up with this image of pilgrimage, I dramatized that in my first book, so literature is where religious belief kind of got real for me, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

How has that kind of work that you’ve been doing at Georgetown for the past few years related to what you’ve been doing outside as a writer?
A lot of the pieces deal with the same subjects. I’m fortunate that I get to think about what I’m thinking about already and I have the wherewithal to find magazines and get that work out to the public. It’s all part of the same work whether it’s a 500-page book or a piece for The Atlantic or a post for Everything That Rises. It’s neat, I get to think in the same way in these different venues. One of the things people are realizing in the time of shrinking big media is how powerful the big media still are. To have access to those magazines is a powerful thing, and not something I ever want to lose. That’s how you get your work out there.

How do you see the work you do at the Berkley Center relating to Georgetown as a whole?
The aims of Georgetown and Storycorps are strikingly similar. How do we receive what’s happened in the past and make that available in the present and study it and think about it and pass it on to the future, for generations to come? A lot of the stories that people have told socially about important moments of their lives, we now have the means to record digitally. So instead of having a powerful memoir be the text that represents religious experience in our time, you could have 100 stories from people of all walks of life. There’s a sense that there’s wisdom that’s worth passing on. Storycorps is based on the idea that everyone’s story is valuable, that’s been my experience of the way things are understood at Georgetown. We need to communicate the fact that people belong to each other and have the responsibility to communicate to each other, and that may sound old fashioned, but it’s still in play powerfully at Georgetown.

What path do you see your partnership with Georgetown taking in the future?
I’d like to have a long future with Georgetown. One of the things that’s now understood in higher education is how much of what’s done at universities is what in the media is called content. We’re making things. Professors are making things with their lectures. It’s an exciting time to be a person who comes from the world of making things to be at a university because universities understand themselves, or Georgetown understands itself, in terms of making and creating probably more than it ever has. That’s where this kind of higher education is going. 

Interview by Emma Hinchliffe