In the new book the “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Hope, Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” the “New Yorker” contributor Eliza Griswold tells the story of one progressive Evangelical Church in Philadelphia spending time with them from roughly 2019 to 2023.
When Griswold first decided to immerse herself within and report on Circle of Hope, the name of the church at the center of the book, she thought she was going to be telling a story about one community about the role of faith and religion in everyday American life and about a different brand of Evangelicalism, then what many Americans think of when they hear that word. But with the events of 2020, the arrival of the COVID pandemic, and the racial reckoning and mass protests that followed the death of George Floyd that story changed.
“Circle of Hope” is the story, Eliza Griswold is the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction, including “Amity and Prosperity,” “One Family and the Fracturing of America,” which was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. She writes for the “New Yorker” and is the ferris professor and Director of the Program of Journalism at Princeton University.
