Tickets
General Ticket: $25
Members: $22
Frank Bruni, bestselling author and longtime New York Times columnist, comes to The Church to discuss his book The Age of Grievance. Join us as we explore his lucid and powerful examination of the ways in which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left. Following this exploration there will be an insightful Q&A with the audience. Books will be available for purchase and to be signed.
Grievance needn’t be bad. It has done enormous good. The United States is a nation born of grievance, and across the nearly two hundred and fifty years of our existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of morally urgent change. But what happens when all sorts of grievances—the greater ones, the lesser ones, the authentic, the invented—are jumbled together? When people take their grievances to lengths that they didn’t before? A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election. Conspiracy theories flourish. Fox News knowingly peddles lies in the service of profit. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Benign words are branded hurtful; benign gestures are deemed hostile. And there’s a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive.
How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward.
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FRANK BRUNI has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, including more than twenty-five years at The New York Times, in roles as diverse as op-ed columnist, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and chief restaurant critic. He is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including The Age of Grievance. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching in the school of public policy. He currently writes his popular weekly newsletter for the Times and produces additional essays as one of the newspaper’s Contributing Opinion Writers.