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Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for\xa0The New Yorker\xa0magazine. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book\xa0The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Most recently, filmmaker Alex Gibney directed an HBO documentary based on\xa0Wright's\xa0reporting in\xa0Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief.

Much of\xa0Wright's work is\xa0about how\xa0religious belief animates personal action\xa0and political conflict. He has documented the Jonestown massacre, explored allegations of Satan worship, profiled brimstone-tinged gospel preachers, and, of course, tracked the histories of al-Qaeda and the Church of Scientology.

Regarding the latter, he isn't necessarily sympathetic to the Church's claims, but he understands its appeal. "People don't go into it because it's a cult, they go into it because they're looking for something," says Wright. "It's like going into therapy;\xa0people do benefit from it."

"But it's one thing to get into it, it's another thing to get out of it."\xa0

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