Junior Parents Weekend Lecture Series
Junior Parents Weekend Lectures
The annual Junior Parents Weekend Lecture brings a prominent public figure to campus for a lecture for Notre Dame juniors and their parents. Each lecture includes a Q&A time along with a reception and book signing. All are welcome.
2026 | Imprinted by Belief with Ayana Mathis
Date: February 20, 2026
Time: 5:00—6:00 pm
Location: Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium
Plan to attend!
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and most recently, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Gabe Hudson Prize. The book was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. The New York Times calls it, “Poignant, heartbreaking,” while The Minneapolis Star Tribune describes it as, “An ardent, ambitious, and carefully stitched tapestry of a novel, one that deserves and rewards our attention.”
Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, T Magazine, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. Currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five-part New York Times essay series Imprinted By Belief.
Mathis is a finalist for the 2025 Dos Passos Prize and a 2025—26 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2024-25 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.
2025 | Circle of Hope with Eliza Griswold
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.
2024 | Poverty and Beloved Community with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an author, preacher, and community-builder who has worked with faith-rooted movements for social change for more than two decades. He is Assistant Director for Partnerships at Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, an Associate Minister at the St. Johns Missionary Baptist Church, and a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Association.
Wilson-Hartgrove is a regular preacher and teacher in churches across the US and Canada and publishes the Substack “Our Moral Moment” with Bishop William J. Barber II. Wilson-Hartgrove is also the author of more than fifteen books, including the daily prayer guide, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, New Monasticism, The Wisdom of Stability, Reconstructing the Gospel, Revolution of Values, and most recently, White Poverty with Bishop Barber.
In White Poverty, Bishop Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove offer a groundbreaking work that exposes a legacy of historical myths that continue to define both white and Black people, creating in the process what might seem like an insuperable divide. Analyzing what has changed since the 1930s, when the face of American poverty was white, they address white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that just might provide the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans.
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2023 | Lives Worth Taking? A Conversation with Liz Bruenig
Liz Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously an opinion writer for The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has also been a staff writer at The New Republic and a contributor to the Left, Right & Center radio show. Elizabeth holds a master of philosophy in Christian theology from the University of Cambridge. At The Atlantic, she writes about theology and politics.
Bruenig has also written about ethics, morality, economics, gender, family, class, and faith. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2019 and in 2023. In 2023, she published her first book, On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy, a collection of compassionate reporting from America’s death row, named a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist for feature writing.
Bruenig’s sensitive reporting pulls back the curtain on an increasingly routine crisis in America’s death chambers: state executioner’s inability to kill the condemned humanely. She takes readers to the torturous final moments of death row inmates, while considering the often heinous crimes that earned them their sentences, and the complex legal system and prison bureaucracy that uphold them. Thoughtful and profound, Bruenig negotiates the culture of violence in America and examines what’s at stake when we refuse to see the humanity in those who have done the inhumane.