An essayist, novelist, and frequent public speaker, Mary Eberstadt has authored several influential books, including How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; Primal Screams; and Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited.
Mary Eberstadt grew up in rural upstate New York and graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University with a double major in philosophy and government. She was a four-year Telluride Scholar and served as the first female faculty liaison at Deep Springs College in California, becoming the first woman to vote in the student body there. Her early work included speechwriting for an American Secretary of State and for an American Ambassador to the United Nations. She has been publishing in magazines and newspapers of note since her early twenties. These endeavors laid the foundation for her continuing vocation as a prominent intellectual not only in the United States, but across the West.
Today, Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute. Eberstadt's books and essays explore crucial contemporary subjects including the transformation of Western culture under post-modernism and the seismic impacts of the sexual revolution and secularization. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and her regular appearances outside the United States underscore her influence on contemporary thought. She is married to the author Nicholas Eberstadt, and they have four children.
-On May 7, 2022, Mrs. Eberstadt gave the Commencement Address at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, which awarded her an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters.
-In 2014, Seton Hall University awarded Mrs. Eberstadt an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.