Colleen Carroll Campbell

Colleen Carroll Campbell began her writing career at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she served as editor-in-chief of the campus magazine, president of the campus chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and a freelance writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She won Society of Professional Journalist Mark of Excellence Awards for her writing and editing, and nearly a dozen awards, scholarships, and memberships in honorary societies for her academic and journalistic achievements. In 1995, she was chosen from a nationwide pool of college students for an American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) editorial internship with Washingtonian Magazine. The following year, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Marquette with a Bachelor of Arts degree in writing-intensive English and a minor in political science.

Campbell’s first full-time journalism job was with the Memphis Commercial Appeal, where she wrote a series of front-page stories exposing political misconduct among elected officials in Collierville, Tennessee. In 1997, she moved to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where she gained experience in investigative reporting and narrative journalism. She graduated from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting in 1998, and wrote a five-part series later that year on the St. Louis Public Schools. The series uncovered corruption and waste in the city school system and resulted in her nomination as a finalist for the Livingston Awards, the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism. The series also caught the attention of the Post-Dispatch's editorial page editor, who invited Campbell to join the newspaper’s editorial board. At age 24, she became its youngest member. Campbell wrote daily editorials on a wide variety of topics, from education and social issues to media and culture, and her work earned her a Fellowship for Editorial Writers from the Hechinger Institute at Columbia University.

In 2000, Campbell won a $50,000 Phillips Journalism Fellowship that allowed her to take a year’s leave from her newspaper job and travel the country, researching and writing about a little-noticed trend that had attracted her attention: the appeal of traditional religion and morality to a growing number of young Americans. The result of her research was The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola Press, 2002), a critically acclaimed book that was a finalist for the 2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award and has been featured in nearly 100 magazines and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, National Review, and Christianity Today. Now in its sixth printing, The New Faithful has been adopted as required reading by several colleges and universities. Since its publication, Campbell has received speaking invitations from institutions across America, including requests to present her research to staff members at the White House and on Capitol Hill. She presented a copy of The New Faithful to Pope Benedict XVI while serving as a North American delegate to an international Vatican Congress on women.

In 2002, Campbell began work toward a doctorate in philosophy at Saint Louis University. She interrupted her studies later that year to accept a job as one of six speechwriters to President George W. Bush. Campbell worked directly with the President on major policy addresses, writing his speeches on such topics as education, the faith-based initiative, the fight against AIDS, and judicial appointments.

After leaving the White House, Campbell served as a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is now a regular commentator on religion, politics, and culture in the print and broadcast media. She writes a weekly op-ed column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, blogs on religion and politics for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and has made more than 200 appearances on television and radio shows, serving as a commentator on such networks as FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She has been quoted by the Associated Press, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor, among many others, and her articles have appeared in such outlets as the Weekly Standard, First Things, National Review Online, Washington Times, Toronto Star, Charlotte Observer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tampa Tribune, National Catholic Reporter, National Catholic Register and New Atlantis. She served as a regular columnist for Our Sunday Visitor and won a Catholic Press Association Award for her bimonthly column in Lay Witness. Her essay on Alzheimer's disease, "Hope in the Ruins," was featured in Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time (Crossroads, 2007), which the publisher describes as a collection of 35 essays from "the most beloved Catholic literary figures, scholars, and theologians of our day."

Since 2006, Campbell has hosted her own international television and radio show, "Faith & Culture." The television show airs twice weekly on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) and the radio show airs three times weekly on EWTN Global Radio Network and Sirius Satellite Channel 160 and twice weekly on Relevant Radio. Filmed on location in cities across America, "Faith & Culture" features Campbell's interviews with prominent authors, activists, artists, and public intellectuals discussing the day's most contentious social and political issues. EWTN is the world's largest religious media network, transmitting programs to more than 105 million homes in 110 countries.

Campbell was honored by her alma mater when Marquette University's College of Arts and Sciences named her its 2004 Young Alumna of the Year. In 2008, she won the Phillips Foundation's Distinguished Conservative Leader of the Year Award, which the foundation uses to honor "young leaders who are rising stars in politics and public policy." She lives with her husband and children in St. Louis, Missouri.