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Alan Wolfe

Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and is writing a book on why liberalism matters.

Recent Articles

Faith in the Center?

John DiIulio's fascinating book takes religious moderation too far.

Alan WolfeOct 21, 2007

Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-Based Future by John J. DiIulio Jr. (University of California Press, 310 pages, $24.95)

Despite all the talk of America's culture war, this country has been blessed by an absence of bloody religious conflict; we've been spared anything like Europe's Thirty Years' War, and our most serious internal war involved race, not religion. To be sure, some of the clashes between Protestants and Catholics toward the end of the 19th century evoke a Kulturkampf, but they do not even come close to the troubles characteristic of the countries from which so many of our Protestants and Catholics originally came.

For America

Alan WolfeMay 14, 2004

Anti-Americanism By Jean-François Revel, translated from the French by Diarmid Cammell, Encounter Books, 280 pages, $25.95

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the
Future Tense By David Brooks, Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $25.00

Liberalism and Catholicism

Alan WolfeDec 19, 2001

In the years immediately after World War II, American liberals split apart over their attitudes toward communism. Those who called themselves progressives rallied around the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, despite evidence aplenty that the Communist Party was disproportionately calling Wallace's shots. Others, including the founders of Americans for Democratic Action, fashioned themselves into anti-communists and lined up behind Harry Truman. For all the differences they demonstrated over communism, however, postwar liberals, as the Notre Dame historian John McGreevy has pointed out, were more unified in their hostility toward the Catholic Church. Three of the countries that had been fascist--Spain, Italy, and Vichy France--were Catholic.

State of the Debate: The Moral Meanings of Work

How should we think about work -- as just a necessary burden that we'd like to cut to a minimum or as the organizing focus of our lives? A number of new books about work, culture, and family suggest that we need to work for more than bread alone.

Alan WolfeDec 19, 2001



WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,
second edition with a new introduction (Basic Books, 1996).

Shirley P. Burggraf, The Feminine Economy and
Economic Man: Reviving the Role of Family in the Post-Industrial Age (Addison Wesley, 1997).

Whose Body Politic?

Alan WolfeDec 19, 2001

The year 1992 will be remembered as the time when

the great Republican coalition, forged in that crucial year 1968, collapsed. In

retrospect, it is suprising that white working-class males, cowboy libertarians,

southern bourbon elites, religious fundamentalists, Yankee WASPS, midwestern

farmers, and Orange County nouveaux riches ever got along at all. Their

current disarray reflects the loss of "macro" issues that once

provided unity, such as the death of communism and practical failure of

Reaganomics. But what increasingly divides this once robust national coalition

are also "micro" issues that reach into the heart of the most intimate

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