Why Religion? Elaine Pagels’s title asks. The whole book, published in 2018, is the answer, but there’s one sentence that distills it all: “While I work on these sayings, they work on me.”
Pagels, professor at Princeton, recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, National Book Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, and the National Humanities Medal, is a public intellectual of the first rank. Her studies of early Christianity, especially Gnosticism, some of them New York Times