Lisa Miller is a staff writer at New York magazine. She is the former religion columnist for the Washington Post, former senior editor of Newsweek magazine, and author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.”

Miller came to Newsweek from The Wall Street Journal, where she was an award-winning senior special writer covering religion for the paper’s front page since 1997. She was also an editor for the Marketplace page (1993-94), where she helped launch the weekly “Health Journal,” and a travel reporter (1994-97).

She started her journalism career as an editorial assistant (1984) at the Harvard Business Review and later became manuscript editor there (1985-87) before moving to The New Yorker (1987-92) and then Self magazine (1992-93), where she was senior editor for arts coverage and created their “In Focus” section in the front of the book. She graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in English in 1984.