Speaking of Proximity | Institute for Social Concerns

YEAR IN REVIEW

Speaking of Proximity

SIGNATURE LECTURES AT THE INSTITUTE

As the University’s home for public scholarship on questions of justice, the Institute hosted three signature lectures—with a common theme emerging among them: getting proximate to justice and the marginalized.

In the fall, Bryan Stevenson, an acclaimed public interest attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, delivered the Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C., Distinguished Catholic Social Tradition Lecture at the historic Morris Performing Arts Center in downtown South Bend. Author of the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Stevenson shared how his life was changed through an encounter with a man on death row at a maximum-security prison in rural Georgia. As the condemned man was being taken from the room and down the hall toward his cell, Stevenson heard him singing the hymn:

I’m pressing on the upward way,
New heights I’m gaining every day;
Still praying as I’m onward bound,
“Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.”

Now 40 years later when people ask him the secret of his success, Stevenson says it’s not simply about working hard or having the right strategy but is because he “got close enough to a condemned man to hear his song.”

“When you get proximate, you hear the songs. And those melodies in those songs will empower you, they will inspire you, and they will teach you what doing justice and loving mercy is all about.”
– BRYAN STEVENSON, Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative

Eliza Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, likewise described the power of proximity for her work as an immersive journalist for the annual Junior Parents Weekend Lecture. For her most recent book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, she spent years immersed in a radical Christian community in Philadelphia in order to tell its story empathetically through the respective lenses of its four very different pastors.

“Journalism comes with this great, necessary superpower, which is that you have to go out and talk to people who believe different things.”
– ELIZA GRISWOLD, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

For the Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture, Andrea Elliott, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants, and other people on the margins, spoke about her experiences with a young girl, Dasani, and her family while writing the book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. Elliott spent eight years immersed in the world of Dasani and her family. The result is a book that considers poverty not in the abstract but through proximity with those most affected.