YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL News Release

CONTACT:    Gustav Spohn, Director of Communications and Publications, 203-432-3466, gus.spohn@yale.edu

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

E.J. Dionne to deliver election 2012 lecture at Yale Divinity School

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne will deliver the Sorensen Lecture at Yale Divinity School on Nov. 27 on the topic “Our Divided Political Heart and the Election of 2012.”  The lecture, free and open to the public, will take place from 5:30-6:30 pm in Marquand Chapel, located on the Yale Divinity School campus at 409 Prospect St., New Haven.  A reception will follow the lecture. A live webcast of the talk at  http://www.youtube.com/yale will allow for interactive participation by the viewing audience.

Dionne, a practicing Roman Catholic, is one of the most prominent commentators on the American political scene today and writes and speaks frequently on the subject of faith, values, and politics.

The topic of his Nov. 27 talk is a spin-off from the title of his most recent book, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012).  In that book, Dionne challenges the concept of radical individualism as the guiding principle for American life and argues, rather, that the true American tradition embraces a balance between love of individualism and devotion to community.  And, in response to popular diatribes against “big government,” he suggests that Americans have historically viewed the federal government as an active and constructive partner with the rest of society in promoting prosperity, opportunity, and American greatness.

Dionne writes a twice-weekly op-ed column in the Post and also writes on the PostPartisan blog. He is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University, and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” His twice-weekly column is now syndicated in over 140 newspapers, and his writing has been published in the Atlantic, the New Republic, the American Prospect, Commonweal, and elsewhere. Before joining the Post in 1990 as a political reporter, he spent 14 years at the New York Times, where he covered politics and reported from Albany, Washington, Paris, Rome and Beirut.

 In addition to his most recent book, he has written four others: Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right (2008), Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004), They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era (1996), and Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee. Dionne grew up in Fall River, Mass., attended Harvard College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford.