Gerald Howard at n+1:
Paul Elie remembers things differently and far more deeply. A cradle Catholic and still an observant one, he has over the years carved out an admirable niche for himself as the thinking believer and village explainer of those hard to fathom people for the readers of the Times, the New Yorker, and similar publications. (He had a first-rate take on Pope Leo’s papacy up on the latter’s website within a day of the new pontiff’s ascent.) The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Elie’s group biography of four prominent midcentury Catholic writers and intellectuals (Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton), is one of the best achieved examples of a tricky genre. He manages to make the fact of his faith very clear while remaining uninsistent about it—unlike, say, the profoundly annoying Ross Douthat, who can’t and won’t shut up about his conversion to Catholicism (as strongly as many of us wish he would). As a critic and historian Elie has clarity, depth, and range—qualities that serve him well as he navigates the stormy and turbid high/low waters of his chosen decade’s cultural output.
Elie is an unusual figure in the secular publications and the lists of the publishers he writes for because he takes religion and its manifestations as primary—not simply as an area of culture (film, music, lifestyle, and so on) treated as just another subject for investigation.
more here.
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