He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1997, hired by
William Kristol to be literary editor of the neoconservative political magazine, the
Weekly Standard, while also serving as Poetry Editor of
First Things from 1998 to 2004. In 2004, the founder of
First Things,
Richard John Neuhaus, brought him back to New York as the new editor of
First Things. Forced out in 2010 after controversy about the future and the funding of the magazine following the death of Neuhaus, Bottum moved to his family's summer house in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Bottum and
Dakota State University announced on May 31, 2017, that he would be taking a new post as the director of the CLASSICS Institute and begin working in the field of cyber-ethics. The CLASSICS Institute is an acronym which stands for Collaborations for Liberty and Security Strategies for Integrity in a Cyber-enabled Society.
Other works After returning to South Dakota, he produced his Kindle Single
Dakota Christmas, which reached No. 1 on the Amazon e-book bestseller list, and he published such print books as the examination of song lyrics as poetry in
The Second Spring (2011), the childhood memoir
The Christmas Plains (2012), and the sociological study of American religion in
An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (2014), together with the e-book collection of selected essays,
Pulp & Prejudice. His Kindle Singles for Amazon include sports Singles on
Tim Tebow and
R. A. Dickey (
The Summer of 43, named by Amazon to its Kindle Singles' list of 2012's "10 Best Books of the Year"), and Bottum's annual Christmas fiction.
Works as an essayist Bottum's essays, poems, reviews, and short stories have appeared in
The Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post,
USA Today,
The Times of London, and other newspapers;
Forbes,
Newsweek,
Commentary, and other magazines; the
International Philosophical Quarterly,
U.S. Catholic Historian, and other scholarly journals. His work has been anthologized in
Best Spiritual Writing 2010,
Best Catholic Writing 2007,
Best Christian Writing 2004,
The Conservative Poets,
Why I Turned Right, and other collections. Among his most widely discussed essays are "The Soundtracking of America" in
The Atlantic, "Christians and Postmoderns," in
First Things, and "The Myth of the Catholic Voter" in the
Weekly Standard. Bottum's 2013 essay "The Things We Share" in the Catholic journal
Commonweal, urging acceptance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriage, was covered by a pair of articles in
The New York Times and by many other publications. Widely cited and attacked, it led to the ostracizing of Bottum in some conservative and religious circles. Other controversial positions Bottum has taken include his opposition to the death penalty, his defense of
Pope Pius XII, and his rejection of abortion. According to
Edmund Waldstein, Bottum understands his own conservative philosophy as a "working out of the insight into the evil of abortion". Bottum's 2014 book
An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America argues that members of the nation's elite class are the spiritual heirs of
Mainline Protestantism, and that this class has triumphed over Catholics and Evangelicals in the culture wars. Reviewing the book for
The American Interest, the columnist
David Goldman wrote, "Joseph Bottum may be America's best writer on religion." In
The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty compared the book to work by
James Burnham,
Daniel Bell, and
Christopher Lasch, suggesting "with the publication of
An Anxious Age, I wonder if these earlier thinkers haven't all been surpassed." Bottum was a contributing editor to the
Weekly Standard and served as distinguished visiting professor at
Houston Baptist University in 2014. In an article attacking him for his stance on same-sex marriage,
National Review nonetheless wrote, "Bottum is the poetic voice of modern Catholic intellectual life. His work . . . shaped the minds of a generation." He has read his
New Formalist poetry on
C-SPAN, done commentary for NBC's
Meet the Press and the
PBS Newshour, and appeared on many other television and radio programs. == Publications ==