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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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

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

Time Runs Out

Lance Morrow

Henry Luce’s America met its demise decades ago. Now, with the sale of Time Inc., Luce’s once-mighty imperial fleet will be broken up and sold for scrap.

Articles

City Journal / February 12, 2018

Man of the Centuries

Lance Morrow

It is rare that one has the chance to become friends with a saint. In Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II, George Weigel rises to the occasion.

Articles

National Review Online / November 10, 2017

Ulysses Grant’s America and Ours

Lance Morrow

In Ron Chernow’s telling, Ulysses Grant became among other things an inquiry into the great American problem: how to reconcile virtue and power.

Articles

Church and State and the NFL

Lance Morrow

When NFL players drop to one knee and bow their heads during the national anthem, they make the game banal. They sabotage the art — a higher art, in its transcendence — and drag it to earth, to politics and grievance. That’s the effect, anyway, regardless of the higher ideals that are professed.

Articles

National Review Online / October 11, 2017