Theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador, Michael Novak currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is Director of Social and Political Studies.

His writings have appeared in every major Western language, and in Bengali, Korean and Japanese. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, has been reprinted often in Latin America, and was published underground in Poland in 1984, and recently in Czechoslovakia, Germany, China and Hungary. One reviewer called it "one of those rare books that actually changed the world."