Athens, Ga. – Bestselling author and editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, will deliver the annual Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture on Friday, March 23 at 11 a.m. in the University of Georgia Chapel.
Meacham’s lecture is entitled “God and Politics from George Washington to George Bush.” It is open free to the public.
Meacham’s newest book, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, was published by Random House in 2006 and became a New York Times bestseller. He is also at work on a biography of Andrew Jackson and his White House circle.
The Ferdinand Phinizy Lectureship was established and endowed by Phinizy Calhoun, UGA class of 1900, as a memorial to his grandfather, Ferdinand Phinizy, who was a graduate of the UGA class of 1838.
Meacham arrived at Newsweek as a writer in January 1995, became national affairs editor in June of that year and was named editor in November 1998. He supervises the magazine’s coverage of politics, international affairs and breaking news, and has written cover stories on politics, religion, race, guns in America and the death of Ronald Reagan.
Meacham’s book Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, was published by Random House in 2003, and was also a New York Times bestseller. It was also named a book of the year by The Los Angeles Times and won The Churchill Centre’s 2005 Emery Reves Award for the best book of the year on Winston Churchill and the William H. Colby Military Writers’ Symposium’s Book of the Year Award.
He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World. In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Random House), a collection of distinguished nonfiction about the mid-century struggle against Jim Crow laws.
Meacham graduated from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree summa cum laude in English Literature. He began his career at The Chattanooga Times.
