Monday, August 17 at 2:00 pm
Speaking in Maine returns to The College of the Atlantic’s Champlain Institute which is holding its sessions in a virtual environment. This year the Champlain Institute is exploring the future of US diplomacy, climate change policy, income inequality, national security, the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court, coronavirus, and other issues that will be critical national topics leading up to the presidential elections in November.
Evangelicals have, in many ways, defined the nation. Constituting 25% of the American population, they have shaped our culture and our politics. In 2016, they voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but they are not monolithic in their politics, ranging from Tea Party supporters to social reformers. What will they do in November and why does it matter? Join activist, environmentalist, and novelist Roxana Robinson and Frances FitzGerald, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.
Introduced by: R. Marie Griffith
Roxana Robinson:
Roxana Robinson is the author of ten books - six novels, three collections of short stories, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices.
Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland, and Spain. Robinson is a scholar of American paintings and an environmentalist, and her essays, criticism, and Op-Eds have appeared in The New York Times,The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of many awards, the most recent the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, from Poets & Writers.
Her novels include Dawson’s Fall (2019), Sparta (2013), Cost (2008), and Sweetwater (2003).
Frances FitzGerald:
Frances FitzGerald is a journalist and author. She has written six books and contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times magazine, Esquire, Architectural Digest, and other publications. Her first book, Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972) received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for history.
FitzGerald graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1962 with a BA in Middle Eastern History. She serves on the boards of directors of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, The Nation, and the Citizens Committee for New York City. She was president of the PEN American Center and The Society of American Historians, and served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard Board of Overseers. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
FitzGerald is married to the journalist and author, Jim Sterba, and lives in New York City.
R. Marie Griffith:
R. Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and the current director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the editor of the Center’s journal, Religion & Politics. Her research focuses on American Christianity, including the changing profile of American evangelicals and ongoing conflicts over gender, sexuality, and marriage.
Griffith has a BA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia and a PhD in the study of religion from Harvard University. Before moving to Washington University in 2011, she served as professor of religion and director of the women and gender studies program at Princeton University, where she was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; and later as the John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at Harvard. In 2015, she was appointed a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Source: College of the Atlantic – Champlain Institute
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