Works by
Stephen L. Carter
(Writer)
[October 26, 1954 - ]

Fiction

• Jericho's Fall (July 14, 2009 release)
  In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his beside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies.
  
  An intricate and timely thriller that plumbs the emotional depths of a failed love affair and a family torn apart by mistrust, Jericho’s Fall takes us on a fast-moving journey through the secretive world of intelligence operations and the meltdown of the financial markets. And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent age.

• Palace Council (2008)
  Philmont Castle is a man who has it all: wealth, respect, and connections. He's the last person you'd expect to fall prey to a murderer, but then his body is found on the grounds of a Harlem mansion by the young writer Eddie Wesley, who along with the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, is pulled into a twenty-year search for the truth. The disappearance of Eddie's sister June makes their investigation even more troubling. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon himself.

• New England White (2007)
  Lemaster Carlyle, the president of the country's most prestigious university, and his wife, Julie, the divinity school's deputy dean, are America's most prominent and powerful African American couple. Driving home through a swirling blizzard late one night, the couple skids off the road. Near the sight of their accident they discover a dead body. To her horror, Julia recognizes the body as a prominent academic and one of her former lovers. In the wake of the death, the icy veneer of their town Elm Harbor, a place Julie calls "the heart of whiteness," begins to crack, having devastating consequences for a prominent local family and sending shock waves all the way to the White House.

• The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002)
  Talcott Garland is a successful law professor and devoted family man. When his father, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Talcott suspects foul play. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage his career, and even his life in his quest for justice. The Emperor of Ocean Park is a captivating legal thriller set in the privileged worlds of upper crust African American society and the inner circle of Ivy League law school.

Non-fiction

• God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (2000)
  In this sequel to his best-selling Culture of Disbelief, Stephen Carter redefines the role of religion in cultural politics, mapping out politics' involvement with religion from freeze-out to overzealous embrace.
  
  America faces a crisis of legitimacy. It's a crisis that dramatizes the separation of church and state. A crisis that, in the messages sent by our culture, marginalizes religion as a relatively unimportant human activity that plays an unimportant role in the national debate. Because the nation chooses to secularize the principal points of contact between government and people (schools, taxes, marriage, etc.), it has persuaded many religious people that a culture war has been declared.
  
  Stephen Carter, in this sequel to his best-selling Culture of Disbelief, argues that American politics is unimaginable without America's religious voice. Using contemporary and historical examples, from abolitionist sermons to presidential candidates' confessions, he illustrates ways in which religion and politics do and do not mesh well and ways in which spiritual perspectives might make vital contributions to our national debates.
  
  Yet, while Carter is eager to defend the political involvement of the religious from its critics, he also warns us of the importance of setting some sensible limits so that religious institutions do not allow themselves to be seduced, by the lure of temporal power, into a kind of passionate, dysfunctional, and even immoral love affair. Lastly, he offers strong examples of principled and prophetic religious activism for those who choose their God before their country.

• Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (1998)
  The acclaimed author of "The Culture of Disbelief" proves to readers that manners matter to the future of America.

• The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (1998)
  Between loyalty and disobedience; between recognition of the law's authority and realization that the law is not always right: in America, this conflict is historic, with results as glorious as the mass protests of the civil rights movement and as inglorious as the armed violence of the militia movement. In an impassioned defense of dissent, Stephen L. Carter argues for the dialogue that negotiates this conflict and keeps democracy alive. His book portrays an America dying from a refusal to engage in such a dialogue, a polity where, indeed, everybody speaks, but nobody listens.

• Integrity (1996)
  Why do we care more about winning than about playing by the rules?
  
  Integrity - all of us are in favor of it, but nobody seems to know how to make sure that we get it. From presidential candidates to crusading journalists to the lords of collegiate sports, everybody promises to deliver integrity, yet all too often, the promises go unfulfilled.
  
  Stephen Carter examines why the virtue of integrity holds such sway over the American political imagination. By weaving together insights from philosophy, theology, history and law, along with examples drawn from current events and a dose of personal experience, Carter offers a vision of integrity that has implications for everything from marriage and politics to professional football. He discusses the difficulties involved in trying to legislate integrity as well as the possibilities for teaching it.
  
  As the Cleveland Plain Dealer said, "In a measured and sensible voice, Carter attempts to document some of the paradoxes and pathologies that result from pervasive ethical realism... If the modern drift into relativism has left us in a cultural and political morass, Carter suggests that the assumption of personal integrity is the way out."

• The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process (1994)
  The provocative author of The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby sheds new light on the process that brought us such public spectacles as the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Lani Guinier fiasco.

• The Culture of Disbelief (1993)
  The Culture Of Disbelief has been the subject of an enormous amount of media attention from the first moment it was published. Hugely successful in hardcover, the Anchor paperback is sure to find a large audience as the ever-increasing, enduring debate about the relationship of church and state in America continues. In The Culture Of Disbelief, Stephen Carter explains how we can preserve the vital separation of church and state while embracing rather than trivializing the faith of millions of citizens or treating religious believers with disdain. What makes Carter's work so intriguing is that he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends. Explaining how preserving a special role for religious communities can strengthen our democracy, The Culture Of Disbelief recovers the long tradition of liberal religious witness (for example, the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements). Carter argues that the problem with the 1992 Republican convention was not the fact of open religious advocacy, but the political positions being advocated.

• Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (1991)
  Yale law professor reflects on his own experience with affirmative action--the benefits he reaped and suffering he experienced as a black man who was able to take advantage of affirmative action programs.