This event is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, School of International Affairs, and Center for Character, Conscience, and Public Purpose.

Contributing Editor at New York magazine, blogger, and author Andrew Sullivan is a popular source of provocative, astute political and social commentary. The Washington Post called him “a media pioneer,” and The New York Times said, “Andrew Sullivan might deserve to be remembered as the most influential political writer of his generation.”  

From 2000 to 2015, Sullivan chronicled every major political and cultural moment in real time on his blog, The Dish. During the blog’s life at Time, The Atlantic, and independently, he helped to legitimize and advance the medium by publishing 250 to 300 posts a week. In assessing his body of work, New York magazine said, “[T]he archive makes a case for Sullivan’s outsize influence on the politics of the new century.”

Joining New York magazine as contributing editor in 2016, Sullivan covers politics and culture, and occasionally writes features, such as his coverage of the 2016 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Also in 2016, Sullivan announced two new books: Keeping the Faith, a spiritual memoir about the future and meaning of Christianity in the 21st Century, and a 30-year retrospective of essays, reviews and posts entitled Thinking Out Loud.

The New Republic’s youngest editor-in-chief, Sullivan was acknowledged for making the magazine more relevant to his generation. He was named Editor of the Year by Adweek and received multiple National Magazine Awards. After working for TIME and The New York Times Magazine, he served as a senior editor for The Atlantic.

One of its earliest activists, Sullivan set the gay rights movement’s agenda for the following two decades with the landmark works: 1995's Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality and 1989's “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.”

Sullivan argued for a conservatism based on practical restraint, individual freedom, constitutional norms, and skepticism in The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Right.  

A practicing Catholic, he has challenged the Church's position on gay life.  He is an Oxford graduate and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.