Ryan T. Anderson

President

Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

He is the author or co-author of five books, including the just-released Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. Previous books include When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender MomentTruth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious FreedomWhat Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. He is the co-editor of A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? Perspectives from “The Review of Politics.”

Anderson’s research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, in two Supreme Court cases.

He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and he received his doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation was titled: “Neither Liberal Nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights.”

Anderson has made appearances on ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. His work has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Harvard Health Policy Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public PolicyFirst Things, the Claremont Review of Books, and National Review.

He is the John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas, a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University, and a Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, as well as the Founding Editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey.

For 9 years he was the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and has served as an adjunct professor of philosophy and political science at Christendom College, and a Visiting Fellow at the Veritas Center at Franciscan University. He has also served as an assistant editor of First Things.

Follow him on Twitter at @RyanTAnd. For his latest essays and videos, you can follow his public Facebook page.

Click here to download a hi-res version of this photo for media and promotional use. Photo credit David Hills.

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Ryan Anderson’s Christmas Book List

Ryan T. Anderson

From Claremont: In the bleak midwinter, long, long ago (the 2010s), we at the CRB had a tradition of inviting…

Articles

Claremont Review of Books / December 14, 2022

Defending marriage: Will Senate Republicans display courage and uphold truth?

Ryan T. Anderson

The Senate “Respect for Marriage Act” pays lip service to religious liberty and conscience rights.

Articles

FOX News / November 21, 2022

How the Eugenics Movement Made Race-Based Abortions Normal

Ryan T. Anderson

Planned Parenthood condemns sex-, race-, and disability-based discrimination in every other context, except when it occurs in the womb.

Articles

American Greatness / June 28, 2022

Why the Arguments about “Bodily Autonomy” and “Forced Birth” Fail to Justify Abortion

Ryan T. Anderson

Examining the bodily autonomy argument for abortion highlights a crucial pro-life point: abortion is wrong not only because strangers shouldn’t kill each other but also and especially because parents have special obligations to their children, and it isn’t governmental overreach to require parents to fulfill those obligations.

Articles

Public Discourse / June 23, 2022

Making Abortion Illegal and Unthinkable

Ryan T. Anderson

It will require much more than the courts.

Articles

National Review / June 23, 2022

We Must Acknowledge That Abortion Harms Women

Ryan T. Anderson

It is easier to defend abortion if you pretend that women who choose abortion are always happy with their decision.

Articles

National Review / June 21, 2022

Anthropological Fallacies

Ryan T. Anderson

Whether you’re discussing abortion or euthanasia, same-sex marriage or transgender ideology, it is highly likely that body-self dualism will be either explicitly appealed to, or implicitly assumed, as the conversation plays out.

Articles

The Public Discourse / June 21, 2022

In the Transgender Debate, It’s Language vs. Reality

Ryan T. Anderson

Transgender activists seem to think that by changing the language used to define sex, they can change reality.

Articles

National Review / June 15, 2022

No, Overturning Roe Would Not Establish Theocracy

Ryan T. Anderson

Since the leaking of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, activists, opinion journalists, and even famous authors have been shrieking that…

Articles

First Things / May 23, 2022

There Is No Escaping Natural Law

Ryan T. Anderson

As much as people today speak of moral relativism and legal positivism, the truth of the matter is that we can’t escape the natural law.

Articles

Religion and Liberty / May 23, 2022

How the Person Became a Self

Ryan T. Anderson

In Strange New World, Trueman uncovers and describes the underlying social and intellectual forces that explain why his grandfather would have rejected sexual reassignment without a second thought but President Biden can declare that “transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.”

Articles

First Things / April 5, 2022

An Open Letter to HHS Secretary Becerra on Ending the Covid-19 Public Health “Emergency”

Ryan T. Anderson

Human flourishing requires both public health and individual liberty and an appropriate balance between these goods when they conflict. We know that human beings flourish in community; we are social by nature. As such, we should not be surprised that government Covid-19 regulations mandating school closures, lockdowns, masking, and vaccination have isolated us from our fellow citizens and imposed significant attendant harms. It is time to declare this emergency over and once again let people take responsibility for themselves.

Public Discourse / March 18, 2022