Political Culture

Democracy & Solidarity

On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice…

More…

Culture Wars

The Struggle to Define America

In 1991, James Davison Hunter became the first to describe what now seems obvious to everyone: that America is deeply divided by a conflict of two moral visions, two tendencies he called “progressivist” and “traditionalist”…

More…

Before the Shooting Begins

Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars

At the very center of cultural conflict today are a host of public issues—abortion, sexual harassment, homosexuality—issues so contentious they have recently provoked violence…

More…

Is There a Culture War?

A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life

In Is There a Culture War? two of America’s leading authorities on political culture lead a provocative and thoughtful investigation of this question and its ramifications…

More…

Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace

The Religious Liberty Clauses and the American Public Philosophy

Freedom of Religion—protected in America for two hundred years by the Bill of Rights—has become more a source of divisiveness than the binding force it used to be in American life…

More…

See also…

Politics & Culture:

Edited by James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen, IV


Ethics & Culture

Science and the Good

The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality

James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky trace the origins and development of the centuries-long, passionate, but ultimately failed quest to discover a scientific foundation for morality…

More…

The Death of Character

Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil

Moral education has become the exclusive province of psychology in America. The last book written by a sociologist on this subject was Emile Durkheim in his volume on Moral Education in 1925. Seventy-five years later…

More…

The Content of Their Character

Inquiries into the Varieties of Moral Formation

For most of America’s history, schools were established to furnish more than just academic training: They were founded to form young people of strong character and civic conscience. We rarely think of our schools that way now…

More…


Religion & Late Modernity

To Change The World

The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry?…

More…

Evangelicalism

The Coming Generation

Winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Distinguished Book Award, this book studies the coming generation of Evangelical leaders and the tension of their theology with the late modern world…

More…

American Evangelicalism

Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity

The field of sociology had entirely ignored the phenomenon of contemporary American Evangelicalism for the better part of the twentieth century. With American Evangelicalism, Hunter introduced the first serious examination of the phenomenon…

More…


Theory & Culture

Making Sense of Modern Times

Peter L. Berger and the Vision of Interpretive Sociology

Peter L. Berger—Hunter’s mentor—was among the pre-eminent sociologists of the twentieth century. His highly creative and controversial writing made a distinct impact not only in sociology but in such disciplines as political science, public policy, history, religious studies and theology…

More….

Cultural Analysis

The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas

Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas…

More…


For Hunter’s full publication corpus, see here.