Loneliness and True Love: The Fallout from the Sexual Revolution and the Christian Way Forward

Jennifer Roback Morse

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., is Founder and President of the Ruth Institute. Dr Morse was 
selected one of the nine top Catholics of the Year in 2013. She discovered an assumption made 
by Adam Smith, the founder of modern-day economics. Smith took for granted that somehow 
helpless children grow into functioning adults capable of making contracts, keeping promises 
and having empathy for others. In other words, she discovered that the economy depends on 
the intact family raising children. Religious thinkers and ordinary moms and dads knew this all 
along, but Dr. Morse brought this common sense observation into direct contact with economic 
analysis. This discovery, which she fully develops in her seminal work Love and Economics, is 
the basis for all of her subsequent work promoting what are now called “socially conservative” 
issues.
In addition to Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village (2001), Dr Morse is 
also the author of Smart Sex: Finding Lifelong Love in a Hook-up World (2005) and in 2013, 
with Betsy Kerekes, 101 Tips for a Happier Marriage: Simple Ways for Couples to Grow 
Closer to God and One Another.
Dr. Morse earned her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Rochester in 1980. She taught 
economics at Yale University and George Mason University. She has served as a Research 
Fellow for the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and has held fellowships at 
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Cornell Law School, and the University of Chicago’s 
economics department.
She founded the Ruth Institute in 2008 to help religiously serious students understand why a free 
society requires socially conservative values, with marriage being the centerpiece around which 
the rest revolve.