Ross Douthat

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Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat, wearing a blue sweater and checkered button-down shirt, speaks into a microphone
Douthat in 2025
BornRoss Gregory Douthat
(1979-11-28) November 28, 1979 (age 45)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation
  • Columnist
  • author
  • blogger
EducationHarvard University (BA)
Subjects
Spouse
Abigail Tucker
​
(m. 2007)​

Ross Gregory Douthat (/ˈdaʊθət/ DOW-thət;[1][2] born November 28, 1979)[3] is an American author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on religion, politics, and society.

Early life and education

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Ross Gregory Douthat was born November 28, 1979,[2] in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.[4] As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,[5] to Catholicism.[6] Douthat has described his conversion to Catholicism as being influenced by the writing of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and J. R. R. Tolkien.[7][8]

His mother is a writer.[9] His great-grandfather was the poet and Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut.[10] His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm[11][12] and a poet.[13]

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.[14]

Career

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Douthat is a regular columnist for The New York Times.[15] In April 2009, he became the youngest regular op-ed writer in The New York Times after replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page.[16][17] Since 2007, he has been the film critic for National Review.[8]

Before joining The New York Times, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.[18] He has published books on the decline of religion in American society, the role of Harvard University in creating an American ruling class and other topics related to religion, politics and society. His book Grand New Party (2008), which he co-wrote with Reihan Salam, was described by New York Times commentator David Brooks as the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head."[19] Douthat's The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020) received positive reviews in The New York Times[20] and National Review.[21] Douthat frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.

In 2025, Douthat began hosting the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times, which explores the New Right and broader evolutions in American politics.[22]

In 2025, Douthat published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.[23]

Beliefs

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Douthat writes: "What I’m looking for when I gamble on a world-picture is something that makes sense of the four major features of existence that give rise to religious questions – the striking fact of cosmic order, our distinctive consciousness, our strong moral sense and thirst for justice and the persistent varieties of supernatural experience. ... And, no surprise here, I think the combination of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is the darkest swan in the sea of religious stories — the compendium of stories, histories, poems and prophecies and parables and (yes) eyewitness accounts that most suggests an actual unfolding divine revelation, and whose unlikely but overwhelming role as a history-shaping force endures even in what is supposed to be our oh-so-disenchanted world."[24]

Douthat has written against abortion, arguing that the development process from zygote to human being is continuous, with no property "that makes the unborn different in kind from other forms of human life — adult, infant, geriatric".[25]

Personal life

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In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.[11] Douthat is a Catholic Christian.[6][7][8] He and his family live in New Haven, Connecticut.[26]

Douthat has written that he suffers from chronic Lyme disease.[27][28]

Published works

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  • Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. New York: Hyperion. 2005. ISBN 978-1-4013-0112-5.
  • Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. With Salam, Reihan. New York: Doubleday. 2008. ISBN 978-0-385-51943-4.
  • Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. New York: Free Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1-4391-7830-0.
  • To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-4694-7.
  • The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020. (The paperback edition, issued in 2021, is titled: The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic.) ISBN 978-1476785240
  • The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Convergent Books. October 26, 2021. ISBN 0-59-323736-6
  • Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 2025. ISBN 978-0-3103-6758-1.

Notes

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References

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  1. ^ Douthat, Ross (July 14, 2008). "Rush Versus Me". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on March 28, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  2. ^ a b Suarez, Maria A. (2009). "Douthat, Ross". In Thompson, Clifford (ed.). Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson Company. pp. 130–133.
  3. ^ @DouthatNYT (October 11, 2016). "My birthday, as it happens" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  4. ^ Lamb, Brian (May 6, 2009). "Q&A with Ross Douthat". Q&A. (c-spanarchives.org). Archived from the original on April 14, 2013. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
  5. ^ Sheelah Kolhatkar (March 6, 2005). "A Pisher's Privilege". The New York Observer. Archived from the original on April 9, 2015. Retrieved March 30, 2009.
  6. ^ a b George Packer (May 26, 2008). "The Fall of Conservatism". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on December 19, 2008. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
  7. ^ a b Oppenheimer, Mark (January 2010). "Ross Douthat's Fantasy World". Mother Jones. Retrieved May 16, 2024.
  8. ^ a b c Chotiner, Isaac (September 18, 2023). "The believer : how the Times columnist Ross Douthat translates faith in the secular world". Profiles. The New Yorker. 99 (29): 20–26.Title in the online table of contents is "Ross Douthat's theories of persuasion".
  9. ^ Ross Douthat. "Anne Rice's Christ". Archived from the original on February 7, 2009. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
  10. ^ Hoffman, Chris (March 18, 2020). "Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat". Connecticut Magazine. Retrieved May 17, 2020.
  11. ^ a b "Abigail Tucker, Ross Douthat". The New York Times. September 30, 2007. Archived from the original on May 7, 2011. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
  12. ^ "John Carmichael (1740–1806) and his wife Esther Canfield (1748–1816) of Sand". 1996 – via Google Books.
  13. ^ Douthat, Charles. "Poems". Retrieved April 12, 2025.
  14. ^ Shah, Huma N. (March 13, 2009). "Crimson Alum Replaces Kristol". The Harvard Crimson. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
  15. ^ Cohen, Patricia (July 20, 2008). "Conservative Thinkers Think Again". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 16, 2011. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
  16. ^ Calderone, Michael (March 31, 2009). "Douthat enters new Times zone". Politico. politico.com. Archived from the original on January 4, 2010. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
  17. ^ Pérez-Peña, Richard (March 11, 2009). "Times Hires New Conservative Columnist". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
  18. ^ Ross Douthat (April 17, 2009). "A Goodbye". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on April 17, 2009. Retrieved April 18, 2009.
  19. ^ David Brooks (June 27, 2008). "The Sam's Club Agenda". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 24, 2009. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
  20. ^ Lilla, Mark (February 25, 2020). "Ross Douthat Has a Vision of America. It's Grim". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 1, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.
  21. ^ Sibarium, Aaron (March 5, 2020). "Our Comfortable Decadence". National Review. Archived from the original on September 22, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.
  22. ^ Spangler, Todd (April 7, 2025). "New York Times to Bow Podcast About Trump Administration's 'Ideas and Personalities,' the 'New World Order' and More Hosted by Opinion Columnist Ross Douthat". Variety. Retrieved May 1, 2025.
  23. ^ Wilson, Kit (February 25, 2025). "Mind the Gap". First Things.
  24. ^ Douthat, Ross (July 6, 2017). "Should Tyler Cowen Believe in God?". The New York Times.
  25. ^ Douthat, Ross (November 30, 2021). "Opinion | the Case Against Abortion". The New York Times.
  26. ^ "Opinion | Your Questions, Answered". The New York Times. January 3, 2019. Archived from the original on January 22, 2019. Retrieved January 21, 2019.
  27. ^ Douthat, Ross (October 26, 2021). The Deep Places by Ross Douthat. Crown Publishing. ISBN 978-0593237366.
  28. ^ Hoffman, Chris (March 18, 2020). "Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat". Connecticut Magazine.
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