“How Can We Hope When It All Feels Hopeless?” A lecture hall of people turned up at the University of Iowa Geneva Campus Ministry lecture Oct. 19 to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Marilynne Robinson and Nicholas Kristof take on this question.
For 50 years Geneva Campus Ministry has been hosting a free lecture series as part of its mission “to foster discourse that unites various communities to pursue goodness, truth, and beauty together.”
“Our hope is that through these lectures we're able to make space for big questions on life and faith that bring together the campus, city, and the church to consider what it means to be human in light of the Christian story,” said current ministry director Brett Erickson.
Erickson said the lectures usually attract “students, faculty, staff, and community members that lean Christian; however, many attendees have no faith affiliation and are attending to hear about the work the guest lecturers are doing.”
Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his investigative reporting in China and Sudan, along with coauthor and wife Sheryl WuDunn, published Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life in 2024. Robinson, professor for 25 years at the University of Iowa, retired as the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing in 2016. Known for best-selling books Gilead, Home, and Reading Genesis, she’s also a previous Geneva Lecture speaker.
Kristof said, “In some ways the issues that I've tried to address in Chasing Hope are also parallel to Marilynne's writing—how we can create a moral compass and combine a moral purpose with our humility, about our tendency to get everything wrong.” He appreciated participating in a lecture sponsored by a Christian ministry, recognizing “that in journalism we don’t pay enough attention to religion in society. We do in Afghanistan but not in liberal or urban America. We don’t appreciate how much it shapes norms, mores, and politics. … How faith fits into the issues of our country. Faith is part of the problem and also part of the solution.”
In addition to the lecture series, Geneva has several other opportunities for Christians to engage on campus. The Christian Writers group has begun the first Christian literary magazine at the University of Iowa, Fount, and Geneva hosts concerts, monthly breakfasts and prayer gatherings, and Ask Me Anything sessions with a Theologian-In-Residence.
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Sarah Lahn, World Renew