Bruce Feiler is one of America’s most thoughtful voices on contemporary life—he uses original research into life transitions, life rituals, and life stories to help people find meaning in times of change.  

Bruce is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including Life Is In the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.  His four TED Talks have been viewed more than five million times; he teaches the TED Course “How to Master Life Transitions;” he is a fellow at the Stanford Computational Psychology and Well-Being Lab, which is writing an AI LLM based on his work.  

Bruce’s latest book, A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us (May 2026), describes his 50,000 mile journey to sixteen countries on six continents chronicling the astonishing rise of reinvented life rituals. From the Vatican to Bali to Ireland, Bruce is known for living the experiences he writes about. Life Is In the Transitions describes his journey collecting hundreds of people’s stories to help us all navigate life transitions with purpose and skill. “One of those books that’s so profoundly aligned with the zeitgeist that you end up underlining the whole book,” wrote Arianna Huffington. 

The Secrets of Happy Families gathers best practices from the country’s most creative minds. It was featured on World News, Good Morning America, and The Today Show, and was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and Parade. 

Council of Dads describes how, when faced with a cancer diagnosis, Bruce asked six friends to support his daughters. The book was profiled in People Magazine, USA Today, and Time, and became a CNN documentary and an NBC primetime drama.  

Walking the Bible describes Bruce’s perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. Called an “instant classic” (Washington Post), the book spent a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into fifteen languages. 

Abraham recounts his personal search for the shared ancestor of the monotheistic religions. “Exquisitely written,” wrote The Boston Globe. Where God was Born describes his trek visiting biblical sites throughout Israel, Iraq, and Iran. “Bruce Feiler is a real-life Indiana Jones,” wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. All were bestsellers.    

Bruce is the host of two primetime series on PBS: Walking the Bible (“Beguiling,” Wall Street Journal) and Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler, in which he retraces pilgrimages in France, India, Japan, Israel, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. (“Feiler is the perfect guide,” said Newsday).  

A longtime columnist for The New York Times, Bruce Feiler writes the popular Substack newsletter "The Nonlinear Life” about navigating life’s ups and downs. He has contributed to The New Yorker, Parade, and Gourmet, where he won three James Beard Awards.  

He has been the subject of a Jay Leno joke and a JEOPARDY! question, and his face appears on a postage stamp in the Grenadines.   A native of Savannah, Georgia, Bruce lives in Brooklyn with wife, Linda Rottenberg, and their identical twin daughters.