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If your faith had an effect on a critical moment in your life, Paul Elie wants to talk to you.

Mr. Elie, who grew up in Latham and attended Our Lady of the Assumption parish there, is best-known as the author of award-winning books like "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage," about great Catholic thinkers and writers Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Day.

A senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center, Mr. Elie is now collaborating with the national non-profit StoryCorps to record the stories of people of various faith traditions about the role of their religious beliefs at pivotal times. The collaboration is called "The American Pilgrimage Project."

StoryCorps interviews have been broadcast on National Public Radio since 2003. Their format is simple: One friend or family member interviews another on a brief story the subject would like to tell about his or her life. About 100,000 such oral histories have been recorded; in addition to the radio broadcast, they're archived in the Library of Congress.

In the beginning
Focusing on oral histories involving faith is a twist that came about because of Mr. Elie's own seeming crisis of faith.

As "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" was being published in 2003, the author was watching the clergy sexual abuse crisis unfold in the Catholic Church. He said he felt "sickness and despair" about seeing some clergymen avoid telling the whole truth about their actions.

He was particularly upset because the only news at the time about the work of the Church seemed to be coverage of the abuse crisis: "That wasn't the whole story."

Mr. Elie had grown up Catholic, processed New York City's unique brand of Catholicism when he moved there, and written about the faith of well-known Catholics. How, he wondered, could he use his "skill set" to tell more of the Church's stories?

The author could have written a book about ordinary Catholics -- but, at a time when people wanted to speak out about their experiences with the Church, he liked the idea of asking them to tell their own stories.

Faith experiences
He also knew Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps. The two met and, immediately, Mr. Isay proposed a partnership.

A precis on the project says its goals are "to deepen our understanding of the role of religious belief in the American pilgrimage, to bring out the variety and vitality of beliefs in individual lives, to attend to the experience of people who are often overlooked, and to preserve and share accounts of American beliefs as a precious resource for future generations."

With funding from a donor associated with Georgetown -- the oldest Catholic university in the country, run by Jesuits -- Mr. Elie undertook a pilot project two summers ago, interviewing 30 U.S. women religious in New Orleans and Pittsburgh.

Since then, he has headed to Tulsa and Minneapolis, and the American Pilgrimage Project interviews have expanded to include laypeople as well as clergy and religious.

Catholics aren't the only ones being interviewed, either. A recent post on Mr. Elie's blog mentions rabbis, a pastor whose spirituality blends Pawnee and Baptist traditions, a Buddhist convert to Catholicism, a leader in naturalist spirituality, a priest who works with Burmese refugees, the young captain of the University of Tulsa's soccer team and many others.

Tell your story
In June, Mr. Elie will come back to upstate New York to interview people in the Albany Diocese. He'll be looking not for people's general thoughts on faith, but for specific stories.

A story, he said, is something that occurred "on a particular day, to particular people," about "how religious beliefs have figured into crucial moments in people's lives.

"It doesn't have to be positive," he added, pointing to one man's recollection of stealing from a store as a child and then believing his actions caused a tragic explosion in his town that killed 300 people. The eight-year-old thought it was a punishment from God.

Mr. Elie said that curating the American Pilgrimage Project has had an effect on him, too. The writer looked back to 2003: "There I was, at a low moment, thinking, 'What can I do?' And what I can do is what I do. I hope, through these stories, we can fix the world a little."[[In-content Ad]]

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