Speaker biographies

Christopher DeMuth has been president of AEI since 1986. He was previously managing director of Lexecon Inc., an economics consulting firm; editor and publisher of Regulation magazine; administrator for regulatory affairs at the Office of Management and Budget; executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration; lecturer and director of regulatory studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; an attorney with the Consolidated Rail Corporation and the law firm of Sidley & Austin; and staff assistant to President Richard Nixon at the White House. He is a director of the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Companies and two family companies. Mr. DeMuth is the editor of several books, most recently Religion and the American Future with Yuval Levin (AEI Press, 2008). His essays have appeared in The American Enterprise, Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and other publications.

Michael Novak is a theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI. He is the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Mr. Novak has written twenty-seven influential books on the philosophy and theology of culture, especially the essential elements of a free society. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Madison, 1982), was published underground in Poland in 1984 and, after 1989, in Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hungary, Bangladesh, Korea, and many countries in Latin America. His latest book is No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers (Doubleday, 2008). For his work and influence, he has received many international awards.

Jonathan Rauch, is a guest scholar in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He is also a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and the author of several books and many articles on public policy, culture, and economics. In 2005 he received the National Magazine Award for his columns in National Journal. His articles have also appeared in The Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. His National Journal column was awarded the second-place National Headliner Award for magazine columns in 2000 and again in 2001. Mr. Rauch’s latest book is Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (Times Books, 2004).

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. She has been a professor of philosophy at Clark University since 1981. Ms. Sommers specializes in ethics and contemporary moral theory and has published many scholarly articles in such journals as The Journal of Philosophy and The New England Journal of Medicine. She edited Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (Harcourt Brace, 1985), one of the most popular ethics textbooks in the country. Ms. Sommers became known to the wider public as the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Touchstone, 1994). Her book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Touchstone, 2000) received widespread attention and praise and was excerpted for a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly. It was included in the New York Times’s “Notable Books of the Year.” Her most recent book, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (St. Martin’s, 2005), coauthored with Sally Satel, M.D., has received a great deal of attention and critical acclaim. Ms. Sommers’s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, National Review, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard.

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