Tuesday, June 10, 2025
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. CEST
Location: Villa Malta (Rome) La Sala
Modern writers as varied as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, R.K. Narayan, and Boris Pasternak placed the individual's struggle with religious faith at the center of their work. What was the nature of this relationship between the writer and God–famously described by Maxim Gorky, apropos Tolstoy, as “two bears in the same den”–and what forms has it taken in our own time? What has contemporary literature lost, or gained, by spurning religion as a traditionally vital source of human drama and perception?
Participants
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of essays, short stories, and novels, including the award-winning White Teeth (2000), which has been been translated into over 20 languages, and On Beauty (2005), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize. She has received many honors including the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal and the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award. Smith is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Javier Cercas
Javier Cercas is a Spanish writer and scholar whose debut novel, Soldiers of Salamina (2001), sold more than a million copies worldwide. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have won numerous awards, including three 2016 European Book Award for El impostor (2014) and the André Malraux 2018 Award for El monarca de las sombras (2017). A professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona, Cercas was elected in 2024 to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). His upcoming book El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo (forthcoming 2025) draws on his experience accompanying Pope Francis on a trip to Asia.
Paul Elie
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. 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.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by June 2 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.