NORWICH – Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, author and war correspondent Chris Hedges will speak at the United Church of Christ (UCC) Sunday to discuss themes from his latest book – “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

The program is the second in what the local church hopes to make an annual series, bringing national speakers to Norwich to address a wide variety of issues, according to Reverend Joseph Connolly, pastor and teacher at UCC.

Also the author of the best-selling “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” – 2002 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction – Hedges’ latest offering “charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion,” according to publisher Knopf Canada.

In the book, Hedges states that two distinct societies now exist – one which “functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth” versus one that is “retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic,” as stated at www.randomhouse.ca.