All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s - Softcover

J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Judge Wilkinson graduated from Yale University in 1967 and received his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1972. In 1982, he became Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. President Reagan appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in August 1984, and he was the Fourth Circuit’s chief judge from 1996 to 2003. His most recent book is Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance (2012). Judge Wilkinson lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. He and his wife, Lossie, have two children, Nelson and Porter.

“J. Harvie Wilkinson has written a bittersweet memoir of how the volcanic years of the 1960s divided America. In Mr. Wilkinson’s eminently fair telling of this saga, all responsible parties get what they deserve.”
―Daniel Henninger, Deputy Editor of the Wall Street Journal

“Beautifully written and persuasively argued, All Falling Faiths is a compelling indictment of trends generated in the 1960s. At the time, the decade was seen as tragic mainly because of the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the slaughter in Vietnam. In retrospect, J. Harvie Wilkinson suggests that these and other calamities contributed to a broader unraveling of American institutions of faith, family, and, in many ways, freedom itself. Whether you agree or disagree with the thesis, this book will challenge you to reconsider many things you thought you knew about one of the most influential decades in US history.” 
 ―Professor Larry J. Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century

“J. Harvie Wilkinson dares to hope that America’s angry, fractured, frequently lawless culture might be an episode rather than an irreversible trend. By tracing our troubles to a specific epoch―the revolutions of the sixties, when in our confusion we ‘could not accomplish great good without inflicting great harm’―he enlists our past to recover our future. And he enlists himself: his memoir of his 1950s Richmond boyhood and 1960s coming-of-age at Lawrenceville and Yale and in the US Army is at once loving and unsparing. Indeed, All Falling Faiths falls squarely in the Southern literary tradition. Deeply observed and poetic, liberal and grounded, aware of the ‘abiding constraints’ of the human condition, Judge Wilkinson’s book is itself a splendid guide to a reconstituted American culture.”
―Christopher DeMuth, Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute and former President of the American Enterprise Institute