James Davison Hunter is the UVA sociologist who gave us the phrase "culture wars" in 1991. Dad said no other thinker had taught him more about how culture is changed.

Hunter read our new book, The Stories We Live By. His words: "This book is wonderful: deeply personal; irenic and pastoral; discerning and substantive, all at once. It will touch many, many people."

Dad was reading Hunter's Democracy and Solidarity in manuscript during the last months of his life. His notes on it hold a list of nine stories he thought our culture was living by; seven of them became this book.

I finished it after he died and have wondered since whether it kept faith with what he saw. Hunter's sentence helps. The book comes out Tuesday, September 22. We talk about what is right in each story, where each one breaks, and what these stories might all point to.