This piece was adapted from a newsletter series for Inkwell and written by former CT NextGen fellow Chris Kuo. Subscribe to the Inkwell Substack here.
Storytelling calls to me because I love the craft of writing and revising, the deliberate, recursive process of tinkering with words, sentences, and story structure. But I also love telling stories because of their ability to transform us—the best ones re-enchant what has grown familiar and introduce us to new, surprising ways of inhabiting the world, altering our thoughts and forming our loves.
Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has mastered this type of storytelling. I’ve admired Bruenig’s work for a while now, ever since I heard her speak at an event during college. Over the years, I’ve grown to recognize her distinctive style, the way her opinion pieces blend on-the-ground reporting, rich sensory detail, and reflections on weighty political or philosophical topics.
By many measures, Bruenig has reached the pinnacle of American journalism. She is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has worked in several of the most prestigious newsrooms.
In a phone call with Inkwell, Bruenig reflected on how her faith influences her work, offered candid observations about newsroom culture, and gave some advice to young journalists. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In your day-to-day work, do you consider yourself a Christian journalist? How do those identities intersect?
I consider myself a Christian and a journalist. The Christian prefix fits over everything I do. I’m a Christian mom, I’m a Christian wife and I’m a Christian journalist, a Christian writer. There’s a really long history of Christian writers. Starting in the early church, Augustine was a Christian writer, so I don’t think it’s hard at all to fit those identities together. The way it affects my work is in my choice of coverage, in my approach to interacting with people, and in my areas of interest. The death penalty is the most obvious because it’s a life issue. And that’s very important to me.
Some Christians who might consider journalism can be intimidated by the atmosphere they might perceive as hostile to faith in some of these elite newsrooms. Have you felt that way?
There are a lot of talented Christian journalists laboring away without making a big deal about it, which is something I didn’t recognize at first as a Christian myself who makes a big deal out of it, which is maybe not what I should be doing. But there are lots of people who are practicing their faith and doing their journalism work in these big institutions day in and day out.
But I don’t think people are mistaken when they detect a certain liberal bent in a lot of mainstream journalism, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the result of any wrongdoing. It’s just when you have people who have those politics, it affects their worldviews and their coverage. It happens to everyone.
There is some hostility. People obviously have a problem with some of the politics that seem to result from the Christian faith at times. There are people at work who won’t even speak to me, which is fine. I understand these are serious issues, and people have all kinds of different views on them that are very personal and closely held. I don’t want to force myself on anyone who doesn’t want to be my friend.
But I think the important thing is if you can go to work every day and do something that glorifies God, in some small way, even if it’s just having an interaction with a source where you’re empathetic and kind, or putting some stuff down on paper that really thinks through Christian virtues and Christian ideas like mercy and forgiveness. I think that’s all you really need.
My family is my rock, and the people who know me and are in my real daily life like me. So I can get by without being widely acclaimed or thought of as a cool journalist on the scene.
What is your relationship like with your editors?
I’ve always had a lot of editorial freedom, which is a gift and something that I appreciate quite a lot. I think generally the editors I’ve worked with have been fairly open-minded, and the country is 62 percent Christian, so there is a big audience out there for people who want to think through topics related to Christianity.
Do you ever think about an alternate career path?
I do think about going back and getting my PhD and finishing it, maybe once my kids are grown. They’re six and nine. I think if I go back and get my degree, it won’t be to have a career in academia. That was my dream for a long time. But you just have to listen to where life is leading you.
Is it important that there are journalists who are Christian in newsrooms like The New York Times or The Atlantic?
I do think it matters. In part, from a standpoint of a magazine trying to reach audiences, there are lots of people in the United States who take the principles of Christianity really seriously. And for people who don’t, Christianity still impacts their daily lives because Christian politics is a real active thing in the United States, as you pointed out.
Not every Christian journalist has to write about Christianity; that’s a weird quirk of my writing. But those ideas and those sensibilities matter. It helps that the journalist can understand where Christians and politics are coming from, and to distinguish the good from the bad in what they’re doing.
What advice would you give to young Christian journalists and writers?
I think the best way to develop your craft of writing is by reading. Every year, somebody puts out the 100 best American essays of the year, and I always buy them and read them because that’s how you learn: by seeing people demonstrate the craft. If you’re trying to do magazine journalism, read a lot of magazine journalism. If you’re trying to do straight news reporting, read a lot of straight news reporting.
Build relationships. Relationships are really key in this industry and probably every industry. If you’re concerned about newsrooms having certain antagonisms, I would just suggest building a lot of close relationships in your real daily life. Consider your profession as a public-facing thing that you do that’s important and meaningful, and it gives you an opportunity to worship God, but it can’t be your whole life.
You don’t go into your career and make it your whole life. I have relationships with lots of people in real life who don’t even know I’m a writer. It’s just not relevant to our conversations. My friends don’t read my writing. It’s just a separate part of my life. And that helps me stay a little sane. At the end of the day, you close your computer, and you have a household of people who love you, and that’s what really matters.
Check out more of Elizabeth’s work:
- The Man I Saw Them Kill at The New York Times
- Inside America’s Death Chambers at The Atlantic
- I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait at The New York Times
Behind the scenes with Bruenig
In her words, Bruenig’s foray into journalism happened largely by accident.
After graduating from Brandeis University in 2013 and earning an MPhil in Christian theology from Cambridge University, Bruenig began a doctoral program at Brown University in religion and philosophy, with the plan of becoming a Christian academic.
Around the same time, her husband Matt landed a job in DC. Tired of maintaining a long-distance relationship, Bruenig dropped out of her program and moved to be with her husband. To earn some income, she started writing for the magazine The New Republic, a move that quickly launched her career as a journalist.
In the decade since, Bruenig has established herself as a voice of moral clarity on a wide-ranging set of topics, from abortion and the death penalty to sexual abuse in the Catholic church and the politics of Bernie Sanders. Informed by her Catholicism and her political convictions—she is both pro-life and proudly socialist—her most distinctive work probes the many facets of human nature, wrestling with concepts of guilt and mercy, judgment and justice.
In the piece that made her a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing in 2019, she describes the ostracization of a teen sexual assault victim in Bruenig’s hometown in Texas. Over the course of 10,000 words, Bruenig grapples with what justice means for someone who has been lied to, mistreated, and discredited.
The art of storytelling, she concludes, can be an act of justice—an attempt, however halting, at seeking the truth and righting old wrongs: “This is my imperfect offering toward that end: a record of what happened, and the willingness to have been troubled by it all these years. It still troubles me now—it will always be unresolved—and I hope that it troubles you, because the moral conscience at ease accomplishes nothing.”
That sentiment is what animates Bruenig’s reporting: the wielding of words, details, and images to trouble her reader’s conscience, and her own, to shake us out of our ease and stir us to action.
Chris Kuo is a writer and reporter with bylines in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Fare Forward, and Christianity Today.
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