Common Read Event - Circle of Hope with Eliza Griswold
An Honors Common Read Event
Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
6:00 p.m.
Shanklin Theatre
University of Evansville
ABOUT THE EVENT
Pulitzer Prize-winning Eliza Griswold will speak about her book Circle of Hope and explore the challenges of overcoming divisions in America. Her presentation, Exit or Voice, will ask: "What do I do when the beloved community I've been part of which could be a political party, a school, a gum, a temple, a church, a country-begins to decay? Do I leave? Do I stay and voice my dissent? What does loyalty mean?"
ABOUT ELIZA GRISWOLD
An author of immense talent and versatility, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eliza Griswold is a journalist, poet and translator. "Writing with a reporter's shrewdness and a poet's grace (Princeton Humanities Council)", her work centers on the complex nexus of religion, politics, human rights, and the environment. Director of Princeton University's vaunted Program in Journalism, Griswold has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker for over two decades and has written and translated several volumes of poetry.
Deeply committed to journalism's role in sustaining a healthy democracy, Griswold has been hailed for humanizing divisive social and political issues through compassionate portrayals of the people and communities most affected. Her exacting and immersive journalism teases out the stories behind fraying institutions and communities, offering us urgently needed perspectives on a rapidly evolving world-one of ever greater divides-between the have and have nots, rural and urban disparities, the perception of environmental issues, shifting political identities, and the sea-changes within contemporary faith and spiritual communities.
Griswold has long sought to understand societies through the lenses of politics, local community, resource scarcity, and faith, but it was growing up in a devout family—her father was the 25th Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church—that made her especially attuned to the politicization of religion and the changes in spiritual seeking in contemporary America.
Her newest, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award and a New York Times Best Book of 2024, provides a timely reflection on a growing pattern of fracture and polarization across foundational American institutions. An intimate chronicle of a close-knit church in Philadelphia as it dissolves amidst idealistic crises, it traces the drift away from traditional organized religion and churchgoing in the wake of modern society's increasingly divergent belief systems.
"A story of both truth and grace, Circle of Hope traces in devastating detail how justice and kindness give way to callous pursuits of power inside one progressive evangelical church." Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John. Wayne