AG Literary Events
Sunday, September 28, 2025
3:00 pm Eastern
Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, 14 Castle Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts
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? Quoting the poet David Whyte in her book, How We Learn to Be Brave, Bishop Budde writes that “courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community.” What is community? Marilynne Robinson, perhaps America’s greatest living novelist, has written that community “consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.” Robinson has defined democracy 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.
Ticket info coming soon!
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 that oversees the ministries of the Washington National Cathedral and Cathedral schools. She is an advocate and organizer in support of justice concerns, 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.” Her acclaimed series of “Gilead” novels, all four of which were selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2021, include: 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).
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 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2025. 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.
Join us this September in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts for the WIT Literary Festival—a celebration of writers, their work, and the vital role they play in society. 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.
Who are we? What do we believe? In what kind of country do we want to live?
Guided by this year’s theme, The Power of Words: Authors & Activism, the WIT Literary Festival welcomes audiences to explore these abiding questions with a distinguished group of speakers renowned for their artistic virtuosity, intellectual passion, moral seriousness, restless faith, and civic engagement.
Learn more about WIT 2025 here.
