Mary Eberstadt
Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in D.C
About Mary Eberstadt
Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC and is Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute. She is an American writer whose contributions to the intellectual landscape traverse genres. An essayist, novelist, and frequent public speaker, she is author of several books of non-fiction, including How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution; and Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Her social commentary draws from fields including anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, popular culture, sociology, and theology. Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the philosophy and culture of Western civilization and the fate and aspirations of post-modern man.
Mrs. Eberstadt’s books and essays have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and Turkish; and her novel The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism, premiered as a stage-play at the Catholic University of America in 2016.
Literary work
Mary Eberstadt (née Tedeschi) is the author of many essays and several critically acclaimed books.
Among them are How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies; and Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution. Her 2019 work, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, includes commentaries on the book's thesis by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel. In 2023, her latest book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited, with a Foreword by the late Cardinal George Pell, was published by Ignatius Press.
Mrs. Eberstadt’s contributions to journalism range from short essays and reviews in mainstream venues like the Wall Street Journal and TIME to longer pieces in journals of ideas such as First Things and National Affairs. She has served on the editorial staffs of three magazines for which she has also written, The Public Interest, The National Interest, and Policy Review.
Her 2010 epistolary novel The Loser Letters, about a young woman in rehab torn between theism and atheism, was adapted for stage and premiered at the Catholic University of America’s Hartke Theater in fall 2016. Other adaptations of the story are underway for future productions.
A proud daughter of Central New York State's Leatherstocking region, named for the American adventure novelist James Fenimore Cooper, Mary is also embarked on a new round of essay and story-writing about this key historical and foundational region of America.
Public Speaking
Mary Eberstadt is frequently invited to speak to professional and private associations, and she has also delivered addresses at campuses and other venues in the United States and beyond. Speeches from her 2022 speaking tour of Australia have been published as a booklet titled "Politics, identity and religion in a post-revolutionary world."
She teaches during the summer at the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society in Krakow, Poland; and during the academic year at the Leonine Forum, a course for young professionals hosted by the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Public service
Mrs. Eberstadt’s public service includes two years on the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff during the Reagan administration, where she was speechwriter to Secretary of State George Shultz. She also served as a speechwriter to the Hon. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
She is engaged with several non-profit and charitable groups, including The Merry Beggars, an association of young Catholic artists creating transformative theater; Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Togo, Africa, led by Rev. William Ryan; and Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, she was a Trustee of Telluride Association, and spent five years on its Board of Custodians. From 2001-2003, she served on the Academic Board of Advisors to the Templeton Foundation.
In 2011, interested in the idea of establishing a literary network for women, she founded The Kirkpatrick Society, an association that has gone on to mentor hundreds of writers.
Mrs. Eberstadt's awards and honors for her work include appointments with various associations and think tanks. In 2016, she became a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. In 2021, she was awarded the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., named for its late director, Fr. Arne Panula.
In 2014, she received the Siena Symposium’s Humanitarian Leadership Award at St. Thomas University in Minnesota; and a Leadership Award from the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild of Nebraska. In 2016, she and her husband Nicholas Eberstadt received the Cardinal O’Boyle Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
In 2022, the Tepeyac Leadership Institute awarded her their St. Juan Diego Leadership Award. In 2021, she was appointed a Distinguished Fellow of the PM Glynn Institute at Australian Catholic University, the largest Catholic university in the English-speaking world. In October 2021, the American Society of Catholic Social Scientists presented her with their annual Pius XI Award for “building up a true social science. 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.
She is also on the International Board of Course Advisors to Campion College, Australia’s first liberal arts tertiary college.
Personal
Mary's lifelong friends are her sister and three brothers, with whom she enjoys playing Texas Hold'Em. Her maternal grandfather was boxing legend Steve Hamas, one-time leading contender for the world heavyweight crown. She and her husband, author Nicholas Eberstadt, have four children, and live in the Washington, D.C. area. The pop artist she enjoys most is Eminem. One of her favorite lines from literature is “manuscripts don’t burn,” the rallying cry of intellectual freedom penned by Mikhail Bulgakov in his novel The Master and Margarita.