WIT Festival presents: Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde & Marilynne Robinson (in conversation with Paul Elie)

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Wednesday, July 30 at noon

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Thursday, July 31 at noon

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To make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said. 

On January 21, 2025, the day after the Inauguration, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde rose to the pulpit of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and asked the President to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives. Have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.” 

What is courage? In How We Learn to Be Brave, Bishop Budde quotes the poet David Whyte, writing “courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community.”  

And what is community? Marilynne Robinson, perhaps America’s greatest living novelist, has written that it “consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know, or whom we know very slightly.” In another context, she has defined democracy in the same way.

How do we tend to the human spirit in a time of fear and harm? Join Bishop Budde and Marilynne Robinson, two luminaries cherished for their wisdom and imagination, for a conversation that promises to be gracious, grave, radiant, and revelatory. 

The conversation between Bishop Budde and Marilynne Robinson is the closing event of the 2025 WIT Literary Festival, an annual celebration of writers, their work, and the vital role they play in society presented by the Authors Guild Foundation. By bringing writers and readers together for an unforgettable weekend of timely conversations, the WIT Literary Festival reflects the belief that a rich culture of free expression is essential to a thriving democracy. Join us on the long weekend of Sept 25-28 for timely conversations between M. Gessen and Michael S. Roth, Torrey Peters and Chase Strangio, Hanif Abdurraqib and Imani Perry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sanaz Toossi, and more.

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde serves as spiritual leader for the Episcopal congregations and schools in the District of Columbia and four Maryland counties that comprise the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The first woman elected to this position, she also serves as the chair of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, which oversees the ministries of the Washington National Cathedral and Cathedral schools. She is an advocate and organizer in support of justice in all its forms, including racial equity, gun-violence prevention, immigration reform, the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, and the care of creation. She was consecrated as the ninth bishop of Washington in November 2011. Prior to her election, she served for 18 years as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. She is the author of three books, most recently How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith (2023). 

Marilynne Robinson was the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” The four novels of her acclaimed Gilead series, each of which were selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2021, are Gilead (2004), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), for which she won the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020). Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her works of nonfiction include Reading Genesis (2024); What Are We Doing Here? (2018); The Givenness of Things (2015); When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012); Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010); The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998); and Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989). She taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Paul Elie is a senior fellow in Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a regular contributor to The New Yorker.  His third book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, was published in May.  He is also the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: The Search for Transcendence in Sound (2012), both of which were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. He lives in Brooklyn.

Learn more about the WIT Festival and see the full line-up at authorsguild.org.