I have this vision that if I do this long enough, I’ll be the sort of person who, when people come to you for advice, I’ll have answers, I’ll have wisdom. There’s a biblical verse, “Blessed are the hungry ones.” So I’m hungry for this sort of knowledge. I had a student come up to me at the end of this class I taught at Yale, and he said, “Since I’ve been taking the class, I’m much sadder than I used to be.” And I took that as a win. The question is: Am I a better person? I hope so. I always try to keep a book like that open. This morning, I read a book about how we find our callings. Every day, I try to read something of some meaning. You wrote that you want “to be better at balancing my life.” How’s that going?

You’ve been writing about your desire to live with a passion for meaning, about how you want to be more like people who display a generosity of spirit. I would have thought it had been the reverse. This year, you’ve written 51 columns on timeless, big questions about the meaning and purpose of life, and 40 columns on news of the moment, mainly politics and policy. There’s been a shift in the tenor and content of your columns and other work over the past year or so. In this interview with Washington Post senior editor and Moment contributor Marc Fisher, he discusses his evolving perspective, while seeking to retain a zone of privacy around his changing spiritual life. Brooks says he now also meets regularly with Christian theologians.Īs Brooks, 54, struggles publicly with questions about who we are and what we believe, he is more cryptic about what he describes as his transition into a new religious community. The recently divorced Brooks is part of an informal Jewish study group led by Orthodox scholar Erica Brown along with fellow prominent Washingtonians, among them former Meet the Press host David Gregory and Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg. Brooks has long attended Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington with many well-connected and politically influential members. In the past year or so, Brooks-who also teaches a course at Yale University and is a regular on NPR and PBS’s NewsHour-has grown noticeably weary of the passing parade of politics, and pivoted from his fascination with social science and neuroscience to matters of faith and morality. And from the right, there were conservatives who viewed Brooks as an apostate-a closet liberal, even. There were liberal readers who bristled over every column-even those that swept aside evanescent political issues in favor of exploring broader themes of American culture. Later, he edited book reviews and op-eds at The Wall Street Journal before moving on to The Weekly Standard.īrooks began his tenure as a columnist for the op-ed page of The New York Times in 2003. He left for a job at Buckley’s National Review, where he made the jump to opinion journalism. After graduation, Brooks worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau, a Chicago wire service.

His father’s college teaching jobs brought the family to New York City and Philadelphia before Brooks headed off to college at the University of Chicago, where he caught the attention of William F. David Brooks, that rare New York Times columnist equally criticized by liberals and conservatives alike, was born in Toronto, Canada.

Bill4time david brooks