Alan Wolfe

"Wolfe, a self-proclaimed atheist, said he recognizes the importance of being open to religious ideas," a 2008 report about an "Ethics of Atheism" debate put it.

Wolfe chairs a task force of the American Political Science Association on "Religion and Democracy in the United States." He serves on the advisory boards of Humanity in Action and the Future of American Democracy Foundation and on the president's advisory board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is also a Senior Fellow with the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York. In the fall of 2004, Professor Wolfe was the George H. W. Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

A contributing editor of The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, Commonwealth Magazine, and In Character, Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, World Affairs and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor to President Bill Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union Address and has lectured widely at American and European universities. He was ranked #98 in the list of the 500 most cited intellectuals in the 2001 book by Richard Posner titled Public Intellectuals.

Earlier in his career, Wolfe was a member of the collective that put out the Marxist-oriented journal, Kapitalistate, whose pages featured articles by such writers as Poulantzas, Claus Offe, Ralph Miliband, and Bob Jessop. By the early 1980s, Wolfe's politics had become more centrist. In 2004, one author characterized him as a radical centrist thinker.

A graduate of Central High School (Philadelphia), he received a B.S. from Temple University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He has honorary degrees from Loyola College in Maryland and St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

Alan Wolfe (born 1942) is an American political scientist and a sociologist on the faculty of Boston College who serves as director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of American Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation in partnership with Yale University Press and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, "dedicated to research and education aimed at renewing and sustaining the historic vision of American democracy".