Pat Fagan Ph.D., (sociology and psychology) from Dublin, Ireland, was a grade-school teacher before specializing in child, family, and marital therapy, becoming a teaching consultant at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, McGill University Medical School’s teaching hospital for family physicians.
After doctoral studies in Washington DC, he switched focus to family issues in public policy, working for Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Family and Social Policy, before joining Heritage Foundation to research and write on the endless connections between marriage and worship in a well-functioning individual, couple, family and society. In the last decade, he built The Marriage and Religion Research Institute, working on the challenges facing students, parents, and pastors, with recent emphasis on fathers and grandparents. He has authored over 30 synthesis papers on marriage, family, children, and religion, and commissioned dozens of analytic studies including The Index of Belonging (measuring the social health of America) and Mapping America (measuring the social capital of America by family structure and religious practice). He and John Bishop are co-founders of The Cornerstone Alliance which focuses on courses for men as husbands and fathers.
He and his wife Theresa have eight children and 19 grandchildren.
