Eliza Griswold is one of our most talented, multifaceted writers today: a poet, a translator from Pashto, and a journalist who wrote profoundly and frequently on the “War on Terror” that characterized U.S. foreign policy after 9/11. She’s a professor of journalism at Princeton University and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
She’s also the daughter of Frank Griswold, who was for more than a decade the Presiding Bishop (the top job in the denomination) of The Episcopal Church in the United States, an articulate and passionate voice in mainline Christianity, who died in 2023. Eliza Griswold grew up in Christian churches, and here she writes about a loss of faith and community at a once-powerful congregation in Philadelphia.
Circle of Hope is the name of the church — which saw great success and demise — and is the subject of Griswold’s journalistic inquiry. It is a long book, rich in detail, telling the story of how a vibrant community of Christians sought to reclaim the word “evangelical” from the politic-ridden right by living out Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount in real-life ways. They established intentional communities in poor neighborhoods, renounced possessions and wealth, created food pantries to replace drug dens, and took literally the biblical vision of “forging swords into plowshares” with public events where they would melt down guns that had been used by gangs in Philadelphia and south Jersey into garden tools for use in their sustainable living programs.
The story of this Christian movement of faith falling apart is at times agonizing to read. And it is almost “current events,” with Griswold’s account coming to its conclusion less than a year ago, in the fall of 2023.
Something she writes in her conclusion has stuck with us: “Churches are messy places where people seek many things, among them a common understanding of something larger than they are, of God. This can be a beautiful, courageous endeavor that, in its effort to do right, usually goes wrong. Maybe churches need to die, to rid themselves of their old bodies, their advanced pathologies, to make themselves new again. To be free of the weight of a past none can carry.”
