Junior Parents Weekend Lecture Series
Eliza Griswold: The 2025 Junior Parents Weekend Lecture
Friday, February 14, at 4 pm
Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium
Reception and book signing to follow.
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.
Her newest book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, 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.
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.
Previous Junior Parents Weekend Lectures
2024: Poverty and Beloved Community with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a spiritual writer, preacher, and community-cultivator. He serves as Assistant Director for Partnerships and Fellowships at Yale University’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy(link is external).
Jonathan is a leader in the Red Letter Christian movement and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He speaks often about spirituality and faith in public life to churches and conferences across the denominational spectrum and has given lectures at dozens of universities and seminaries.
2023: A Conversation with Atlantic Writer, Liz Bruenig
Liz Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Bruenig has traveled across the United States covering the experiences of those sentenced to death in the prison system and discussed the problems of execution and the rights of incarcerated people.