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Wilfred M. McClay

Contributing Editor

Wilfred M. McClay, a New Atlantis contributing editor, is SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is also a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a member of the National Council on the Humanities.


In The New Atlantis


A Far Other Butterfly

Number 33 ~ Fall 2011

The Particularities of Place

Number 31 ~ Spring 2011

Principle, Prudence, and the “Party of Death”

Number 15 ~ Winter 2007

Beyond the Right to Life

Number 14 ~ Fall 2006

Science and Self-Government

Number 4 ~ Winter 2004

Books


  • Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, edited (Eerdmans, 2007)
  • Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, coedited with Hugh Heclo (Johns Hopkins, 2003)
  • A Student’s Guide to U.S. History (ISI, 2000)
  • The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina, 1994)

    • Other Publications


  • “Still the Redeemer Nation,” Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2013
  • “The Federal Idea,” The Imaginative Conservative, January 5, 2013
  • “Honoring Faith in the Public Square,” Christianity Today, October 11, 2012
  • “The Tocquevillean Moment . . . and Ours,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2012
  • “Liberalism After Liberalism,” First Things, May 2012
  • “Response to Papers by Major, Baldwin, and Bailey: Democratic Statesmanship and the Blue Guitar,” Perspectives on Political Science, Spring 2012
  • “The Desert's Austere Grace,” First Things January 2012
  • “The Cities of God and Man,” The City, Winter 2011
  • “Winter Stories,” Commentary, December 2011
  • “A Day for The Constitution,” Jack Miller Center Quarterly Report, Fall 2011
  • “Memorializing September 11,” National Affairs, Fall 2011
  • “The Enduring Irving Kristol,” First Things, August/September 2011
  • “In Search of the Next Great American Songbook,” in Acculturated, edited by Naomi Schaefer Riley and Christine Rosen (Templeton Press, May 2011)
  • “The Illusion of Mastery: Man and Authority,” The City, Spring 2011
  • “Exceptionally American,” Claremont Review of Books, Winter/Spring 2011
  • “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” Commentary, February 2011
  • “‘The Report of Our Death Was Greatly Exaggerated,’” Commentary, November 2010
  • “The Sources of American Renewal,” Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2010
  • “A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation,” Historically Speaking, January 2010
  • “The Equilibrist,” National Review, October 19, 2009
  • “What Do Experts Know?,” National Affairs, Fall 2009
  • “The Soul and the City: The House of Our Realities,” The City, Summer 2009
  • “An American Virtue,” In Character, Spring 2009
  • “The Obama Dilemma,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2008
  • “Our Buried Sentiments,” Touchstone, September 2008
  • “The Burden of the Humanities,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2008
  • “Whatsoever Things Are True,” Provocations: Commentary & Conversion from the Trinity Forum, March 2008
  • “Religion and Secularism: The American Experience” Pew Forum, December 3, 2007
  • “A Left-Handed Salute,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2007
  • “Prof in a Box,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2007
  • “Recovering the Western Soul,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2007
  • “Out of Mortal Threat, an Opportunity,” National Review Online, May 14, 2007
  • “God and Man in Rome,” Commentary, March 28, 2007
  • “The Soul of a Nation,” The Public Interest, Spring 2004
  • “The Mixed Nature of American Patriotism,” Society, November—December 2003
  • “The Ph.D. Octopus, 100 Years On,” Books & Culture, November—December 2003
  • “Emerson and Us,” Weekly Standard, September 1—8, 2003
  • “Tradition, History, and Sequoias,” First Things, March 2003
  • “Pseudo-Intellectual,” The Public Interest, Spring 2002
  • “Mastery’s Shadow,” Touchstone, March 2002
  • “The Continuing Irony of American History,” First Things, February 2002
  • “America—Idea or Nation?,” The Public Interest, Fall 2001
  • “The American Scholar,” Weekly Standard, July 8, 2001
  • “Individualism and its Discontents,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2001
  • “History for a Democracy,” Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2001
  • “Teaching Religion in American Schools and Colleges,” Newsletter of the Historical Society, November 2001
  • “Remembering Santayana,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2001
  • “Community and the Social Scientist,” The Public Interest, Spring 2001
  • “The Gods of Princes,” Touchstone, March 2001
  • “Clio’s Makeshift Laboratory,” First Things, March 2001
  • “Two Concepts of Secularism,” Journal of Policy History, Spring 2001
  • “Defining Humanities Up,” First Things, January 2001
  • “Croly’s Progressive America,” The Public Interest, Fall 1999
  • “Yesterday’s Philosophy of Tomorrow,” Weekly Standard, June 14, 1999
  • “Hazards of New Fortune,” First Things, December 1998
  • “Is America an Experiment?,” The Public Interest, Fall 1998
  • “Fifty Years of the Lonely Crowd,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1998
  • “Reagan versus the Intellectuals,” The Public Interest, Spring 1998
  • “The Worst Decision Since Dred Scott?,” Commentary, October 1997
  • “The Mystic Chords of Memory,” History Matters, October 1996
  • “The Soul of Man Under Federalism,” First Things, June—July 1996
  • “A More Perfect Union? Toward a New Federalism,” Commentary, September 1995
  • “The State of American Higher Education,” Academic Questions, Spring 1995
  • “The Socialization of Desire,” Society, May—June 1995
  • “The Hipster and the Organization Man,” First Things, May 1994
  • “Historical Research on the Refugee Intellectuals,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Spring 1994
  • “Clio in 2013: The Writing and Teaching of History in the Next Twenty Years,” Academic Questions, Winter 1993
  • “John W. Burgess and the Search for Cohesion in American Political Thought,” Polity, Autumn 1993
  • “A Tent on the Porch,” American Heritage, July–August 1993
  • “Religion in Politics; Politics in Religion,” Commentary, October 1988
  • “A Babylonian in Zion,” Reviews in American History, March 1988
  • “Weimar in America,” American Scholar, Winter 1986
  • “Two Versions of the Genteel Tradition: Santayana and Brooks,” New England Quarterly, September 1982