Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is one of the most important texts in the history of sociology, and people have been citing it with various degrees of approval and understanding for more than a century now. But as the United States increasingly moves into a post-Protestant, even a post-Christian age, readers of Weber may wonder if and how the American spirit is changing.

Our guest today on Christian Humanist Profiles is one of America’s leading Catholic intellectuals, Dr. Joseph Bottum, whose latest book is an attempt to answer just that question. Our readers may be familiar with his writings from The Weekly Standard, Commonweal, and many other magazines, or with his numerous other books of poetry, essays, and fiction. His latest book is An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.