Lance Morrow

Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow

Lance Morrow is the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focuses on the moral and ethical dimensions of public events, including developments in regard to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and political correctness on American campuses, with a view to the future consequences of such suppressions.

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Lance Morrow is the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focuses on the moral and ethical dimensions of public events, including developments in regard to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and political correctness on American campuses, with a view to the future consequences of such suppressions.

Morrow’s award-winning essays, appearing in TimeSmithsonianThe New York TimesThe Atlantic, and other publications, have offered probing analyses of American culture and politics in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century.

Morrow wrote about every presidential election from Nixon to Obama, wars from Vietnam to Bosnia to the Middle East. Morrow was the author of more than 150 cover stories for Time, including eight Man of the Year articles.

He is currently writing a book about Henry Luce and his magazines’ role in shaping American culture and opinions in the middle third of the 20th century. Morrow is a strong believer in the role of journalism in sustaining freedom and democracy.

The son of an editor of the old Saturday Evening Post and of a Washington columnist for the Knight syndicate, Morrow grew up in Washington. He attended Gonzaga High School, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. For nine years (1996-2005), he was a University Professor at Boston University, where he taught presidential history and the art of the essay.

The author of seven books, Morrow is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award—the first for his original coverage in essay form of American cultural affairs, the second for his essay that was part of Time‘s special coverage of September 11th.

Morrow’s study of the question of evil, arising among other things from his travel in the Bosnian war zone with Elie Wiesel, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.  Later, he turned the article into a critically acclaimed book—Evil: An Investigation.

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Will Political Hatred Spill Into the Streets?

Lance Morrow

The atmosphere in Biden-Trump America carries the odor of Weimar Germany or Chicago in 1968.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / March 15, 2024

How We Think About Hell

Lance Morrow

Has the old idea, fire and brimstone through all eternity, gone out of business?

Articles

Wall Street Journal / March 7, 2024

Biden, Trump and American Vanity

Lance Morrow

The old WASP elites often had terrible judgment, but we should miss their ideals of leadership and service.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / February 22, 2024

Black History Month Is More Complicated Than It Seems

Lance Morrow

Celebrate the story of survival and liberation, but beware dwelling too much on suffering and grievance.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / February 16, 2024

Can Harvard Learn Anything From Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Lance Morrow

A university should be a home for those who seek truth, not a madrassa of the progressive left.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / January 9, 2024

Trump vs. the Woke: Let the People Decide

Lance Morrow

Both might be disqualified as a threat to democracy. Leaving it up to the voters seems the only option.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / January 2, 2024

America Feels Like a Codependent Household

Lance Morrow

America feels like an alcoholic household—crazy with grievance, accusation, irrational rage, screaming in the middle of the night. The children lie in the dark, wide-eyed, listening.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / December 25, 2023

Keeper of Christmas

Lance Morrow

I dismissed the story of Scrooge as a seasonal cliché—an item of nineteenth-century kitsch. But David, a nineteenth-century sort of man, taught me to respect it —especially Dickens’s actual 1843 novella, the written version rather than one of the films.

Articles

City Journal / December 24, 2023

The New Antisemitism Is the Oldest Kind

Lance Morrow

This isn’t the midcentury ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ variety. It’s the return of pure hatred of the Jews.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / December 3, 2023

To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth

Lance Morrow

He left behind millions of words in often-distinguished books that are sweeping and grandly objective, sometimes, yet also self-exonerating. 

Articles

City Journal / November 30, 2023

Remembering Jesuit Education, Back When

Lance Morrow

America was a different country, sixty or seventy years ago. Was it a better world? Was it a better Church? They are questions worth discussing.

 

Letters from the Synod—2023: #11

Xavier Rynne II

Reports and Commentary, from Rome and Elsewhere, on the Synod on Synodality: “For a Synodal Church—Communion, Participation, Mission”

First Things / October 25, 2023