Paul Lichterman

Paul currently is Professor of Sociology and Religion at the University of Southern California. A cultural sociologist and ethnographer, he has studied a variety of political and religious associations and is the author of Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (2005), The Search for Political Community (1996), and coeditor of The Civic Life of American Religion (2009). His book Elusive Togetherness won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Pacific Sociological Association. He is currently finishing research for a project on how different ways of articulating social problems—the problem of affordable housing in this case—travel and become widespread, marginal or linked to other social problems in the public arena.