Book Talk: Circle of Hope

And the rest of the Friday "Fun," 7 March 2025

Well it’s been another week in paradise. Delon Trusk is still the Dogedent, but I do have a special treat for you right at the top. I got together with my friends and fellow authors, Cara Meredith and John Hawthorne, to talk about a book that really stuck with us, Circle of Hope by Eliza Griswold. Enjoy!

Preorder Cara’s book (release date 29 April) Church Camp and buy her first book, The Color of Life

Order John’s book, The Fearless Christian University

Read John’s review of Circle of Hope

Watch Diana Butler Bass’s conversation with Eliza Griswold (for Diana’s paid subscribers)

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My new career as protestor continues. First, on Saturday night, I braved truly arctic winds (it felt like straight from Moscow) to watch

Benjamin Wittes

put on one of his laser projections on the National Mall in protest of the Trump/Vance mob boss tag team routine in the Oval Office.

Then today, I went to a small PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) rally. For those who don’t know, PEPFAR is (or was) a hugely successful, bipartisan program started by George W. Bush to provide life-saving antiretrovirals (ARVs) to HIV positive people, mainly in Africa. ARVs prevent HIV from becoming AIDS and reduces transmission to near zero, especially between pregnant mothers and their babies.

Before PEPFAR, Africa faced an AIDS catastrophe of societal proportions. AIDS stood to wipe out much of a generation of people in Africa, in their productive years, leaving their children orphaned and their families without income. Many countries faced the prospect of economic collapse. AIDS also killed many children, who contracted it from HIV positive mothers in the womb. And many of those mothers contracted it through gender based violence and domestic abuse, rampant in Africa.

PEPFAR changed that. PEPFAR has saved the lives of 26 million Africans. It has prevented the transmission of HIV to 1,400 unborn babies per day. At less than 1% of the federal budget. It’s one of the biggest foreign policy and humanitarian successes in human history.

And now its fate is up in the air. Much of PEPFAR-related programming has been canceled or suspended, and the entire HIV/AIDS health sector in Africa is in chaos. People will die. Children will die.

Dr. Matthew Loftus, a medical missionary at a hospital in Kenya spoke at the rally. He has tried more generally to communicate to evangelical Christians in particular—who backed PEPFAR for years but who now appear to be turning their backs on it in fealty to Donald Trump—how vital and effective the program is. He published this in Christianity Today.

Unfortunately there are other missionaries I know who have bought into MAGA propaganda about foreign aid, despite literally having a front row seat. It goes to show you that in the digital age, you can remain in your right wing information bubble even if you move across the globe. Missionary work can just as easily reinforce one’s self-righteousness as it can mature and challenge one’s faith.

The story of PEPFAR is the story of white evangelical rot in a nutshell. It was championed by an evangelical President Bush and the more educated, enlightened set of evangelical leaders at the time. That was back when those kinds of people had influence in the movement to keep the venality at bay. Now they have none, and the masses of evangelicals, even those who absolutely know better, have completely traded Christian love for self-preservation and are following a authoritarian leader who is promising them cheap power in exchange for their souls.

I went from the PEPFAR rally to an impressively large Rally for Science at the Lincoln Memorial. I couldn’t stay long, but I did see the heroic Dr. Francis Collins, the recently retired head of the National Institutes for Health. Among other things, he was Anthony Fauci’s boss and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project. Incidentally, he’s also a devout Christian, who sees no conflict between faith and science and rejects authoritarianism as an enemy of both.

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I’m working on an article for The Bulwark about the mainline Christian response to Trump 2.0. I’m probably overly influenced by my own response. I feel compelled to dig deep. I’ve joined the choir, have led a book study, and this past Sunday, I drug my whole family to a Rise Against Hunger event, at which we packed 12,000 meals for vulnerable children around the world.

I even went to my first ever Ash Wednesday service. Evangelicals aren’t big on the church calendar, so I never had the opportunity to observe it before, and honestly, I never had much inclination since joining my mainline church several years ago.

In fact, I will confess that in the past several years, I’ve put the bare minimum of interest and effort into being a Christian. I’ve had far more ambivalence.

But something is up with me. I want to go to church. I want to get a good word and a hug from my pastors. I want to be around a community that is as grieved and alarmed as I am. I want to be around people who care and want to do something. Thankfully, that is my particular church community.

And on Ash Wednesday, I actually did want to hear that I am formed of dust and to dust I shall return. Being more than dust, imagining you are a god who must hold the world together, is pretty overwhelming and exhausting. I want to rest in my own humanity. I want to know that I am limited. That doesn’t feel like powerlessness to me. That feels like a relief.

So, like dust in the wind, I’m just going to keep floating on the breeze to wherever it takes me. Probably to more protests. OK, definitely more, I’ve got another one tomorrow. It’s Washington, Demonstrations Central these days.

It’s a privilege to live here. It’s a privilege to live in these times.

I just want to say again clearly that I post these activities, something I would not normally do, not to tell you how awesome I am. I post them to show you how desperate I am, to do something, to connect, to feel less alone. Maybe you’re feeling that way, and you don’t know what to do. Maybe you’ll get some ideas and motivation to get out there, for whatever it’s worth. I have no idea what it’s worth.

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Benjamin Wittes

roped me into multiple co-hosting sessions this week. Fun times.

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I’m doing some good reading, but not nearly enough, so I’ll save that for next week.

I will leave you with a new painting I did.

Yes, Ida, but then Fox News was invented.

Grace and peace, friends. Godspeed. Go well.