LAFAYETTE (LA)
The Current
April 24, 2019
By Christiaan Mader
By the mid-1990s, journalist Jason Berry wanted to move on from writing about the Catholic Church. His landmark book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, published in 1992, was an incendiary act of reporting, breaking wide open a clergy sex abuse scandal that has embroiled the church ever since. In his bid to move on, he turned his attention to New Orleans, his hometown and the other work-defining subject of his literary life, for a new focus in his career, beginning a history that would take him years to complete. When the Boston Globe published a landmark series in 2002, hanging the sex abuse scandal back on the national conscience, Berry was whisked once again into the throes of reporting that he began in and around Lafayette in 1985, writing on special assignment for The Times of Acadiana.
“I could have continued to write about the Catholic Church for the rest of my life,” he tells me. After another decade exploring the secrecy and politics of Rome, Berry returned to chronicling New Orleans. In 2018, just in time for the city’s tricentennial, he published City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300. A history teeming with life and detail, City of a Million Dreams contemplates the productive tension between extroverted African cultures and staid, orderly European society. New Orleans, in Berry’s telling, is defined by that grappling — between hedonic pleasure and Old World pieties, the black spirit and the yoke of white supremacy. He’s also working on a documentary of the same name, which will hit the film festival circuit in 2020, coincidentally the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Berry will make a pair of appearances discussing City of a Million Dreams in Lafayette this week. On Thursday, he’ll speak at an event hosted by UL Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies at 3:30 p.m. On Friday, he’ll deliver an address at a luncheon organized by Friends of the Humanities, at The Petroleum Club of Lafayette at 11:30 p.m.
We spoke by phone on Easter Sunday. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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