Events at the Philadelphia Citizen pretty much always draw smart, civically engaged audiences. Monday’s audience for The Citizen’s book signing event with Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker writer (and poet! and translator!) Eliza Griswold, however, outdid itself. The 150-plus people who came to hear and speak with the author about her new, Philadelphia-based work of nonfiction, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, was next level engaged.
Griswold, who this month became Princeton University’s director of the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism, specializes in covering politics, the environment and religion. Her book began as an effort to cover a “radical evangelical” church, a sort of left wing of Christianity whose believers are more concerned with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” etc.) than with politics of the moment. She landed on Circle of Hope — “a happy community of Jesus loving people who really lived their beliefs, in the street,” she said, “a quirky subculture” — not just at a time when American evangelicalism had taken on a whole new identity, but also at the start of the radical congregation’s existential crisis.
Former and current Circle of Hope congregants were among the audience members. So were members of Griswold’s late father’s Episcopal faith community, journalists and city leaders, including City Councilmember At-Large Nicolas O’Rourke, whose efforts to transform Black men who’d planned to vote for Trump to instead vote for Harris Griswold recently wrote about in the New Yorker.
Below, check out some photos and the video of the event.
VIDEO OF THE FULL EVENT
PHOTOS FROM ELIZA GRISWOLD BOOK SIGNING
MORE CITIZEN EVENTS COVERAGE