
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.
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 Time, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The 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.
Shall We Have Civil War or Second Thoughts?
Lance Morrow

Have we reached the tilting point on the subject of race? Americans don’t quite know anymore what they mean when they say “we.”
Articles
The Wall Street Journal / August 18, 2018
Political Harassment is for the Birds
Lance Morrow

What happened at the Red Hen is reminiscent of the way mobbing crows attack an eagle or an owl.
Articles
The Wall Street Journal / July 7, 2018
Did an Ancient Greek Anticipate Trump?
Lance Morrow

Heraclitus’ view of the world in constant flux found echoes in Hegel and now in the president.
Articles
The Wall Street Journal / June 23, 2018
Farewell, Old Friend
Lance Morrow

Stefan Kanfer had a primitive integrity of character, at ease with his various roles.
Articles
City Journal / June 22, 2018
Return of the Notman
Lance Morrow

The age of opioids (among other contaminations) suggests a look back at the odd Robinson Jeffers, and at what he said in his poems—and at his cranky and ruthless life as a semi-solitary poet living on what was then a wild stretch of the central California coast.
Articles
City Journal / June 18, 2018
Two Washington Women
Lance Morrow

Dovey Johnson Roundtree, an accomplished lawyer who died recently at 104, and the victim in her most famous case were a fascinatingly contrasted American pair.
Articles
City Journal / May 24, 2018
Profane Reality, Sacred Memory
Lance Morrow

Fifty years after his death, Bobby Kennedy remains a case study of the “Euhemeristic” process at work in the modern American framework of religion, politics, celebrity, all mingled—a vivid man in passage from the intense, profane reality of his time to the realms of sacred memory.
Articles
City Journal - Spring 2018 issue / May 22, 2018
Lost Souls
Lance Morrow

It seems that not only the White House Correspondents’ Association but also journalism itself needs to think about the state of its soul and needs, so to speak, to refresh its theology.
Articles
City Journal / May 1, 2018
A Gift of Grace to the United States
Lance Morrow

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a gift of grace to the United States—a country that may have been unworthy of the gift, or else unable to understand it.
Articles
City Journal / April 3, 2018
The Age of Travesties
Lance Morrow

The violence, pornography, and squalid politics of America in 2018 are an indictment of what we have become, and what we have come to tolerate.
Articles
City Journal / March 2, 2018