Rusty Wright

Rusty Wright is an award-winning author, lecturer, journalist and syndicated columnist who has spoken on six continents to university students, professors, executives, diplomats and professional athletes. He has appeared on television talk shows in cities around the world and trains professionals in effective communication. He holds a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Duke and a Master of Theology from Oxford.

His material has appeared in mainstream newspapers across the US and has been used in any of 14 languages by more than 2,000 websites. He makes his articles and audio and video resources available to editors free of charge, asking only for proper credit, a note when they post or translate, and a link back to his site. His website gathers the writing by topic — faith and the evidence for it, ethics, psychology and mental health, relationships, sports, film, humor and current events — and offers articles in more than a dozen languages, from Spanish and Chinese to Albanian and Indonesian.

Much of his recent writing takes the form of short op-eds on new films, published by the Washington Examiner and MSN, that use a movie as a doorway into deeper questions. His newest column asks whether UFOs and God are real, following a documentary that interviews experiencers, scientists and faith leaders. Others have looked at Daniel and the Fiery Furnace and what an ancient official's refusal to bow teaches about unethical bosses and whistleblowing, at The Brink of War and the Reagan–Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, at Young Washington's costly youthful blunders, at a new animated Animal Farm that irks both political sides, and at The King of Kings, drawn from the story about Jesus that Charles Dickens wrote for his own children.

A second strand of his work is bridgebuilding across political and religious lines. With Mark I. Pinsky, a leftist Jewish journalist and longtime newspaper reporter, Rusty has written and spoken about whether philosophical opposites can get along, including a Duke University media conference session and a nationally syndicated radio conversation about their unlikely, enduring friendship. He has also written on the depolarization work of Braver Angels, on the hard work of listening, and on racism and the changing of racist hearts — his own included — and a Boston-area television series recently interviewed him about his faith story and these bridgebuilding efforts.