Experts in the Film

Alan Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent books include Does American Democracy Still Work? (forthcoming from Yale University Press, September, 2006) Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What it Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press, 2005), and The Transformation of American Religion: How We actually Live our Faith (Free Press, 2003). Both One Nation, After All and Moral Freedom were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year.

A contributing editor of The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, Commonwealth Magazine, and In Character, Professor Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and other magazines and newspapers.

George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute. He previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Visiting Professor at the Ècole des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1995) and at the Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico (Summer, 1995).

Dr. Lakoff has published a multitude of articles in major scholarly journals and edited volumes. He is the author of the influential book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition, (2002). He is also the author of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind (1987) and co-author of Metaphors We Live By (1980) [with Mark Johnson].

David Domke has been focused on the relationships among U.S. politics, journalism, and public opinion for more than two decades. He worked as a journalist for several newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the Orange County Register and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He recieved a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1996, and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington.

His most recent book, God Willing?: Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the "War on Terror," and the Echoing Press, was published in August 2004 by Pluto Press. Professor Domke has combined this research with a broader commitment to higher education also a priority, and in 2002 he received the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award, the university's highest honor for teaching.

Ross Douthat joined the Atlantic Monthly staff as a reporter/researcher in 2002. Now an associate editor, he edits the letters section of the magazine, oversees "Primary Sources," and writes on topics ranging from higher education to national politics to celebrities' religious conversions.

Ross is a 2002 graduate of Harvard University, and his Ivy League experience inspired his 2005 book Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, and Details. He also blogs, intermittently, at www.theamericanscene.com.