Chaplaincy Welcomes Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson
On Monday, October 3, 2022 the Office of the Chaplaincy hosted the 35th annual Weinstein-Rosenthal Forum featuring award-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. The Forum is among the most visible events the Chaplaincy leads each year, is generously supported by the Weinstein and Rosenthal families, and explores themes connected to faith, ethics, and global society. We are so grateful to the to the Weinstein and Rosenthal families for providing this extraordinary experience to the UR community at no cost.
Isabel Wilkerson focused her remarks on themes developed in her most recent book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, picked as Time’s 2020 must-read book which examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and demonstrates how a hierarchy of social divisions still defines our lives today.
A full house of students, faculty, staff and community members at the Alice Jepson Theatre in the Modlin Center for the Arts was riveted by extraordinary insights into the difficulties and possibilities of American society. Ms. Wilkerson took questions for nearly 30 minutes at the close of her remarks and then stayed and signed books and spoke with admirers for close to two hours. A wonderful reception followed the event.
Ms. Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is also the author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller, The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Time’s list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
The 2023 Weinstein-Rosenthal Forum is currently planned for Monday, October 9 at 7:00 p.m. in the Alice Jepson Theatre of the Modlin Center for the Arts and will feature the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. Prof. Putnam has been called America’s most influential academic and will focus his remarks on his new book Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and Can do so Again. Please consult the Weinstein-Rosenthal Forum website for updates.