Today David Gregory is in New Hampshire, naturally: as NBC’s chief White House correspondent during George W. Bush’s administration, and then as host of Meet the Press, he gained an up-close knowledge of the presidency such as few people (even people in Washington) possess, and he is putting it to use in election-year commentary for Fox and CNN.

The other day Gregory was in Riggs Library at Georgetown, taking part in our Faith & Culture conversation series.  He’s the author, this past year, of How’s Your Faith? – a book that is as candid an account of a public figure’s religious journey as any I’ve read lately, and a book that gives insight into the whys and wherefores of his deepening Jewish faith.  

He told us about his study group of brilliant Jewish journalists (Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks, and Franklin Foer, among others); the creative form of Sabbath observance in his household (youth sports schedules are consulted; a martini is involved); the role of Psalm 27 in his spiritual journey – and especially about his experience of the presence of God, an experience that seldom figures into discussions of Jewish identity and affinity and is rarely described with the term “faith.”  

He was so steadily on point that, there on stage in conversation with him, I forgot for a moment that he’s not an accredited expert in this stuff – that his world-class achievements are in political journalism.

And that was the appeal of the conversation.   His presence wasn’t inevitable, or professionally apt: he was opening up an aspect of his adult life that many of us wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Introducing Gregory, I noted that he was the series’ first Jewish guest, our first journalist, and our first author to take his book title from a remark made to him by the president of the United States.  But he was a first in this way, too: our first guest whose religious commitment isn’t front and center in his public life – but is what Flannery O'Connor called a “dimension added.”

Now the door is open for other such guests to tell us about the added dimension.