Why did you want to visit Hillsdale? 

In my professional life, I often find myself in a position where I am a representative of religious belief within secular audiences and, at other times, I find myself as a representative of secular culture speaking to religious audiences. I am politically fairly progressive, and I feel very strongly that we ought to be able to move in different political environments as well. It’s disturbing to me that the church seems to be breaking down along the same political sectarian lines as the culture at large. So as someone who is fairly progressive, and spends most of my life in a more or less secular milieu, when I am invited by institutions that are not just religious institutions, but politically conservative institutions, I’m actually very eager to come. I take it as a good sign that I’m welcome here, and I want to honor that spirit by showing up and having conversations.  

Why did you leave the church and then come back? 

I think, at a certain point, the tradition that you come from and the values with which you were raised have to get put into question. If you can’t put them into question, then you can never really fully embrace them yourself. I was educated by Jesuit priests, who are actually very encouraging of asking these questions. When I was in college, I came back to New York, and I went to our local parish. I asked to speak to one of the priests, and I said, “I may stop going to church and taking communion.” And he said, “Well, go ahead, and let me know how it goes.” I did not end up concluding that the kinds of questions that I had been taught to ask were not legitimate questions. The entire modern philosophical tradition from Descartes onward has been attempting to answer questions about the ultimate nature of reality, about the place of human beings within that order of reality, about the nature of human knowledge about reality, about how we ought to live, etc. There were atheistic answers to those questions, and I spent a long time working through those, but eventually I wound up being dissatisfied by the various answers that I found.

Your talk was on the novel as a secular art. What did you mean by that? 

The first thing I want to do in the talk is think about the concept of the secular as something that is complementary to, rather than opposed to, the concept of the religious. This is a very Christian and, in particular, a very Catholic idea. In the Catholic Church, priests who join orders are known as religious priests. Diocesan priests who do not join orders are known as secular priests, and that is because the secular is the realm of everyday human life. With the religious being, the realm of life as it is oriented toward the transcendent, as it is oriented toward the fullness of time. It’s actually a very important innovation of Christian religion that both of these things matter. The emergence of what we now understand as secularism – which 

says that ordinary human flourishing is the only good there is – that’s not secular, that is secularism. That period of time during which that emerges also happens to be the great period of the novel. In understanding the secular and the religious as complementary rather than opposed, I want to make an argument for why people who are religious believers would still want to practice the secular art and why it would be a 

mistake for them to try and make it something other than secular. 

What is the novel’s purpose?

I think every great novel asks questions. The idea of the valor of everyday life and the novel as a remembrance of those people who would not have been included in an epic, that’s another one of the purposes of the novel. I do think that one of the purposes of the novel is to find a way to orient us toward the transcendent even as we live our secular lives. There are many purposes, but I think that the fact that it doesn’t have a simple purpose is one of the things that defines the genre.

Why did you want to work at Harper’s magazine? How did you get the job? And then why did you leave?

Harper’s is a magazine that I have read for a very long time. And one of the things about the magazine is that it has always been fairly heterodox and open to a lot of different views. It’s among the mainstream, secular, New York publications, and it had always been the one that, I think, was most open to writing that had an element of spiritual longing. I came to it by way of its publication of work by David Foster Wallace. In 2008, when I was in my late 20s and had already finished my first book, I applied to be an intern there, mostly to learn how to write for them, and I wound up getting hired out of internship as an assistant editor as a fact checker. I went from being an intern to an assistant editor to eventually the deputy executive editor and then the editor-in-chief of the magazine, and I worked there until just a couple of weeks ago. As for why I left, it’s very simple and straightforward. My writing has always been my primary project. For most of my time at Harper’s, I was able to balance my writing with my work. And as I moved up the ranks of the magazine, it became more challenging because the job became bigger. The other thing that happened is I had kids. I had a family life. I just reached a point where I could not do all of these things at one time.

Did you always want to be a journalist?

I had a very strong sense that writing was what I wanted to do from a very young age. But I wanted to be a fiction writer rather than a journalist. I spent my 20s writing a novel that will never be published. I started writing pretty seriously when I was maybe 16 years old, and I was in my 30s before my first piece of fiction was published. That’s just how long it takes. I did publish one nonfiction book in the meantime, but I knew I wanted to write fiction and I knew it would take me a while. And it was with that in mind that I accepted the job at Harper’s. I think some people who want to write fiction make the mistake of misunderstanding the time horizon. It’s not about carving out six months or a year for yourself. You need a sustainable life where you’re getting the work done, and then you let the work take however long it takes.