Lew Daly

Lew Daly is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at Dēmos in New York City (www.demos.org). A writer on religion, political development, and economic thought, Daly’s recent books include (with Gar Alperovitz) Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance (The New Press 2008), which proposes a new theory of distributive justice based on the collective nature of wealth creation; and God’s Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), a comparative study of church-state law and welfare governance in Europe and the United States. He is also the author of God and the Welfare State (The MIT Press, 2006), and has published articles, reviews, and commentary in many publications, including Dissent, Commonweal, Newsweek.com, The Boston Review, Theoria, The Journal of Markets & Morality, Sightings, and Church & Society.
Daly was previously a fellow of the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy, where he worked closely with then-president Bill Moyers on special projects. He formerly worked as a research fellow with the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland, and as a researcher and strategist on religious advocacy. In the mid-1990s, Daly did pastoral work in a federal prison as well as community organizing on labor issues. With a B.A. degree from Oberlin College, he holds advanced degrees from Brown University, the University at Buffalo, and Union Theological Seminary. Raised in central New York, he has lived in New York City with his family since 1996.