Elizabeth Bruenig
She was previously an opinion writer for The New York Times and The Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She has also been a staff writer at The New Republic and a contributor to the Left, Right & Center radio show. She currently hosts a podcast, The Bruenigs, with her husband, Matt Bruenig. Elizabeth holds a master of philosophy in Christian theology from the University of Cambridge. At The Atlantic, she writes about theology and politics.
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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. The Twin Drives of Love and Death
Atlantic writers have long meditated on these two fates of all living things.
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Alabama Gets Ready for Its Gas-Execution Experiment
After submitting Kenneth Eugene Smith to a failed lethal-injection execution in 2022, the state is now preparing to try again, this time with a novel method.
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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. Final Words
What death-row inmates said as they prepared for their execution
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Millennium Images / Gallery Stock Have Yourself an Early Little Christmas
Why I put my tree up before I carve the Thanksgiving turkey
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Baseler Totentanz / Getty This Halloween, Let’s Really Think About Death
Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July commemorate events. Halloween memorializes the occasion of death.
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Sarah Rice / Redux Shawn Fain’s Old-Time Religion
The president of the United Auto Workers is part of a tradition that was once far more visible in American public life: the Christian left.
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Photo-illustration by The Atlantic; Sources: ADOC; Getty. Jimi Barber Died a Forgiven Man
A man’s sincere jailhouse conversion met the indifference of the capital-punishment system.
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Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: … Alabama Wants to Kill Jimi Barber
After a year of botched executions, the state is eager to prove that it can kill someone without incident.
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. What It Means to Forgive the Unforgivable
James Barber killed Sarah Gregory’s grandmother in 2001. What connects them now?
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Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: … Don’t Execute People in Public
But don’t execute them in secret, either.
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Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty A Country Governed by Fear
How America became a violent society
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Getty Why Won’t Powerful Men Learn?
No law and no regulation yet has been ambitious enough to solve the problem of rich and unaccountable men.
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Jon Brenneis / Getty Sick All the Time
If the pandemic ought to have given us anything, it should have been a more universal empathy toward the condition of illness.
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Trent Parke / Magnum A Prayer for Less
Pleasure is vast, cheap, kaleidoscopic. Lent is the time to forgo it—and seek peace.
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Alessandra Benedetti / Corbis / Getty; Pfeiffer / … Pope Benedict XVI and the Church After the Fall
He saw the magnitude of the damage the Catholic Church had inflicted, and his retreat came nearest to acknowledging it.
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California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation / Getty Alabama Makes Plans to Gas Its Prisoners
After a series of botched executions, the state is choosing a path of technical, rather than moral, innovation.
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Getty; The Atlantic Too Wild to Love
Texas must have taught me what beauty is, because I still search for it everywhere I look.
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Getty; The Atlantic A History of Violence
Why does Alabama keep botching executions?
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Erik Carter / The Atlantic; Getty On Murders Especially Heinous, Atrocious, or Cruel
The death-sentence trial of the Parkland shooter was an exercise in finding explanations where none existed.
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Matthew Busch / The New York Times / … Death of a Sinner
A Texas prisoner fought for the right to have his pastor pray over him and lay hands on him during his execution. Now his pastor reflects.
