Ross G. Douthat

In the summer of 2015, Ross G. Douthat; his wife, Abigail Tucker, whom he married in 2007; and their children left the fast pace of Washington, DC, for a 1790s farmhouse in the Connecticut countryside. The move was meant to be a fresh start. But soon after, he noticed a swollen lymph node, followed by stiffness, strange vibrations in his head, and chest pain. Doctors blamed stress,  even as he lost forty pounds in ten weeks. The eventual diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease would shape the next several years of his life. As he struggled with his health, the faith he had long written and thought about became something he leaned on just to get through each day.

Douthat later told this story in his 2021 memoir The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. The illness taught him endurance and humility, and it made his religious convictions personal in a way they hadn’t been before. That experience still shapes how he writes about suffering, belief, and the search for meaning in modern life.

Born on November 28, 1979, in San Francisco, California, Ross Gregory Douthat grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, within a family of writers. His father was a lawyer and poet, and his mother was an author. Faith defined his childhood: His family moved from the Episcopal Church to Pentecostalism, and when he was 17, they joined the Catholic Church. After graduating from Hamden Hall Country Day School in 1998, Douthat attended Harvard University. There, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude in 2002 with a BA in history and literature. His first book, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, came out in 2005.

Douthat worked as a senior editor at The Atlantic from 2002 until April 2009, when he joined The New York Timesas an op-ed columnist, becoming the youngest regular writer on its opinion page. He has also been a film critic forNational Review. His other books include Grand New Party (2008, with Reihan Salam), Bad Religion (2012), To Change the Church (2018), The Decadent Society (2020), and Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025). In 2025 he launched the Times podcast Interesting Times, and he serves as a media fellow at the James Cardinal Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. In July 2026, after seventeen years at the Times, he joined CBS News’s 60 Minutes as a correspondent. His Times opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, said he was “right about things early, wrong about things honestly, and never, not once, boring.”¹

Much of Douthat’s writing examines the place of faith in modern life. He believes religion is reasonable and necessary—not a retreat from rationality—and he encourages people to look past vague spirituality and commit to a religious tradition that offers community, moral direction, and guidance through life’s hardest questions. His work invites readers of every background to take belief seriously and see that suffering and doubt can deepen faith rather than weaken it. Through his books, podcast, and new role at 60 Minutes, he continues to elevate questions of faith and meaning to a broad national audience.