Episode 8: Hard Won Pilgrimages: Paul Elie discusses Literature, Bach’s Music, and his Journey as a Catholic

After Paul Elie first read Dorothy Day, he started working in a soup kitchen. And when he read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer the first time, he admits he “didn’t get” what Percy was onto. Lucky for him, he was working at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (FSG), a place that upholds “a belief in books” and “the power of literature.” He had a few lunches with Robert Giroux, who was then on a reduced schedule, and came to see the stories of Walker Percy, like Flannery O’Connor, like Thomas Merton, and like Dorothy Day, centered on “pilgrimage.”

Photo credit - The Berkley Center

Since FSG had already published books that contained “group portraits,” Elie wanted to do the same with these four writers. And so began his own pilgrimage—an activity he defines in The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage—as follows:  

…a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened, the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience.

In the book he argues that the various pilgrimages undertaken by these writers did not evolve out of mid-century Catholic immigrant flowering, leading ultimately to the election of John Kennedy. Instead, Elie suggests, their pilgrimages were “hard won.” They arose not “as the fruit of culture, but from the depth of their own searches.” Their journeys mark his own, not only in his magisterial book, but also in Elie’s own life.

Elie says he “has no wish to be outside the Catholic story,” that he maintains a love of the church despite sometimes writing about “awful stuff.” In writing for the “secular press” he tries to have it “both ways.” He wants to write for people who have nothing but disdain for the church as an institution, while still honoring the ways his own imagination has been formed by it. It doesn’t always go well because it’s a task that requires the “cunning” and “indirection” that Percy and O’Connor used in their fiction—and it’s often misread.

If pilgrimage and imitation form the structure of his first book, “reform and revival” comprise his second: Reinventing Bach. When a grad student at Columbia, Elie often listened to days dedicated to jazz and came across their week-long celebration of Bach. As he says, he “came first for the jazz, but stayed for the Bach.” It was an “immersive experience” for him, one he could not have had if he had tried to go out to buy individual recordings. And so the idea of the history of Bach recordings, constantly reforming and reviving Bach’s music, struck him as something worth pursuing—Reformation words (reform and revival) for a reformation artist, one who seems to get a pass in culture for being deeply religious AND an artist.

Elie also discussed The American Pilgrimage project, which he directs in collaboration with StoryCorps. He has learned that the diversity of American Religious experience “surpasses my broadest expectations of it.” Americans challenge their faith institutions while using the measure of the institution’s own ideals, but they remain connected.

We are grateful for Elie’s own “hard won” pilgrimages in his books and his story. You will be too. You can find his contributions to The New Yorker here.

PBS News Hour: Pope Francis says laws that criminalize homosexuality are ‘unjust.’ Paul Elie of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs joined Geoff Bennett to discuss the pope's interview.

Pope Francis, in a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press, spoke at length about his health, his critics and the future of the papacy. Most notably, he called laws criminalizing homosexuality fundamentally unjust and said being homosexual is not a crime. Geoff Bennett and Paul Elie discuss how should we understand the pope's remarks that being homosexual is not a crime, even as he stands by Catholic teaching.

Paul Elie’s recent article in the New Yorker, Pope Francis Speaks Out on Homosexuality—and Further Angers Traditionalists, can be found here.

The Culture of Encounter: Initial Reflections - Paul Elie

Two decades into the new century and emerging from a global pandemic, we face a new challenge: an increasingly fractured world divided along political, social, and religious lines. Over the course of his pontificate, Pope Francis has proposed a way forward out of this global crisis: the creation of "a culture of encounter" in which "we can also speak with those who think differently, as well as those who hold other beliefs, who do not have the same faith." A culture of encounter, however difficult to sustain, may represent the only viable way to negotiate and bridge differences for the global common good on issues from climate change to social and economic development and peace. Over the course of 2021 and 2022 the project will convene a global network around this concept. It is a partnership between the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Pontifical Council for Culture, Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, with generous support from the GHR Foundation.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.