Ross Douthat leaves. Jim Daly retires. An era is ending.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 29, 2026

As Dr. Jeff Mirus puts it, “Years ago we developed a commentary category on CatholicCulture.org called ‘Quick Hits’, the goal being to make a series of rapid-fire points about the news, without belaboring those points.” We haven’t used this category as often lately and I haven’t used it at all. Until now:

Ross Douthat to join CBS as correspondent for 60 Minutes

Forgive my selfishness. It’s a good move for Douthat but it’s not a good move for those of us who love his New York Times column and podcast. Given the limitations of the format—commercials and so forth—I can’t imagine Douthat being as thorough in a 60 Minutes interview as he was with his guests on Interesting Times. But Bari Weiss is a genius so perhaps they will figure it out.

More to the point, if this means he will no longer be writing a regular column, then I would put Ross Douthat leaving the New York Times for CBS up there with the death of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the founder of First Things. It would be that big of a loss to the world of written commentary. Not that he was ever a Neuhausian polemicist but it was Douthat who most filled the huge hole in Catholic commentary created by Neuhaus’s death. There is no other writer today who was as keen an observer of the religious landscape or whose judgments of it were as sound.

In fact, much as I saw Douthat as Neuhaus’s successor, having Douthat at the New York Times took it to a whole new level. The Times’ readers needed to be exposed to Douthat’s—to our—worldview. Including dissenting Catholics. The letter the liberal Catholic professors sent to the Times a few years ago intimating that the Times fire Douthat is a classic. (See here and here.) If Douthat had been writing the same things at The Free Press or First Things, they wouldn’t care as much. But that Douthat was daring to defy the Left on its own sacred ground, the New York Times, was just more than they could take. It was a beautiful thing.

Jim Daly to step down at Focus on the Family

This item will get a lot less notice in the Catholic world. But it shouldn’t. Jim Daly’s pending departure from Focus is, in its own way, as big as Ross Douthat’s departure from the Times. But for a different social stratum and for different reasons. I wrote a year ago about the enormous importance of the Evangelical Protestant ministry Focus on the Family, and especially of its founder, Dr. James Dobson. Much of the infrastructure utilized by Catholics and Evangelicals alike in fighting for faith and family in the United States are the legacy of Dr. Dobson.

While always firm on principle, Daly’s legacy at Focus these last twenty years was to deemphasize the culture war. In that, he was a man of his time. During the second Bush Administration and into the Obama years we saw Daly replace Dobson at Focus on the Family, Russell Moore replace Richard Land as the head of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Timothy Keller become the Evangelical guru of seeker-friendly Christianity. Pope Francis pursued a similar course of deemphasizing hot button cultural issues and Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option was widely misinterpreted as a justification for disengaging from fights for the defense of marriage and the family.

The Christian leaders of that era believed that their kinder, gentler ways would lead to better results than the more confrontational leadership that immediately preceded them. They seemed like the spiritual equivalent of Indiana’s then-Governor Mitch Daniels, a Republican who wanted a “truce” in the culture wars. To those of us in the trenches, the truce sometimes felt more like a surrender. Things have only gotten worse. Abortions are up, marriages are down, religious liberty is under greater assault, and the Left now thinks it’s ok to cut off children’s genitals. The Tim Keller stuff didn’t work. You’ve heard of Nixonmaxxing? The Christian faithful needs some Dobsonmaxxing.

Family Policy Alliance conferences

But Focus on the Family never quit the culture war altogether and its public policy DNA was reorganized and rebranded as the Family Policy Alliance (FPA), the umbrella organization linking my own group, Family Institute of Connecticut, to our pro-family sister groups in most of the other forty-nine states. I was at FPA’s annual Social Conservative Convention in Washington, DC last week. It was both edifying and sobering.

“On our watch, America failed,” former Sen. Rick Santorum thundered in one session, and he’s not wrong. Gay marriage did lead to a decline in marriage, fertility is way down, etc. Santorum was a prophet for working class family values long before J.D. Vance. But he says efforts like the Trump Accounts are a mere Band-Aid.

Dobson or Daly? What works or doesn’t work? Watch CBS on Sunday nights to find out.