Chris Hedges

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans, writes and speaks extensively on war, religion, American culture, empire, and the conflict in the Middle East. He is the author of the bestseller War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a book that draws on the many conflicts he covered to explore what war does to societies and individuals. He has examined faith and belief in American society in his books Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America, his New York Times bestseller American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and I Don't Believe in Atheists, his critique of New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, a book praised by The Times Literary Supplement as the most astute dismantling to date of the New Atheist argument. He is also the author of the bestseller Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, an examination of the illusions that beset American culture as it retreats into fantasy and severs itself from reality. In Death of the Liberal Class, he argues that the pillars of the liberal establishment – the press, liberal religious institutions, labor, public education, culture, and the Democratic Party – have surrendered to corporate interests or been so decimated as to become ineffectual, shutting down the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform that is vital to the maintenance of a democratic state. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 and previously worked for The Dallas Morning News, NPR, and The Christian Science Monitor. He served as The Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times and the Middle East Bureau Chief for the paper. He is an Arabic speaker and has spent seven years in the Middle East and perhaps more time in the Palestinian territories than nearly any other American reporter. Hedges, while based in Paris, was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

He holds a BA in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity (M. Div) from Harvard Divinity School. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the academic year 1998-1999 where he studied in the Department of Classics. Hedges has an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. Hedges, who knows Latin and ancient Greek, also speaks Arabic, French and Spanish.

Hedges has written for Foreign Affairs, Granta, The New Statesman, Harper's, Mother Jones, The Nation, Adbusters, and The New York Review of Books. He writes a weekly column for Robert Scheer's web magazine Truthdig.com and is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute.