Join us for the launch of Phil Lawler’s new book, Ghost Runner, from Sophia Institute Press.

One of America’s most respected Catholic writers and cultural critics, Lawler bursts onto the fiction scene with a riveting debut novel that plunges readers into the hidden battles of the Church in the 1980s. Lawler exposes beneath the surface of parish life and chancery politics a world of secrets, compromises, and spiritual warfare—where the faithful struggle to survive and a young priest discovers that he has a special mission—and powerful enemies.

Phil Lawler is editor of Catholic World News, the first English-language Catholic news service operating on the Internet, which he founded in 1995. His essays appear regularly on CatholicCulture.org as well as his own Substack.

Mr. Lawler has served as Director of Studies for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank based in Washington; as founder and president of a national organization of Catholic laity; and as editor of Crisis magazine. In 1986, he became the first layman to edit The Pilot, the Boston archdiocesan newspaper. From 1993 through 2005, he was editor of the international monthly magazine Catholic World Report. His essays, book reviews, and editorial columns have appeared in over 100 newspapers around the United States and abroad, including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe. Ghost Runner is his first novel.

He and his wife Leila (the author of the best-selling Summa Domestica) have seven children and (at last count) twenty-two grandchildren. The Lawlers now live in central Massachusetts.