Date: Wednesday, January 6, 2027
Time: 7:30-8:30pm ET / 4:30-5:30pm PT
Live on Zoom
Free registration required
Join the Jesuit Media Lab Book Club for a live Zoom conversation with author Robert P. Baird on his debut novel “The Nimbus.” The live event will be facilitated by JML Book Club moderators Nick Ripatrazone and Mike Jordan Laskey.
Named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post
This riveting debut novel is about a child whose literal enlightenment sets the stage for an exuberant tragicomedy of marriage, religion and parenthood.
On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation.
Though it appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the nimbus quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see the otherworldly glow; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging divinity school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.
At once a rollicking intellectual satire, a searing portrait of a family in crisis and a thrilling metaphysical page-turner, “The Nimbus” offers a comic and profound examination of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanity’s timeless search for meaning.
Robert P. Baird grew up in Northern California, studied mechanical engineering and human biology at Stanford, and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has worked as an editor at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Chicago Review and Esquire and has published journalism, essays and reviews in those magazines and other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children. “The Nimbus” is his first novel.
Robert P. Baird grew up in Northern California, studied mechanical engineering and human biology at Stanford, and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has worked as an editor at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Chicago Review and Esquire and has published journalism, essays and reviews in those magazines and other outlets.
Mike Jordan Laskey is the director of communications at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. He leads a team responsible for the Jesuits.org website, social media and vocation promotion.
Nick Ripatrazone is a writer, editor and teacher. He is the culture editor for Image Journal and a contributing editor for the Catholic Herald (UK).
