Paul Wilkes

Paul Wilkes is a journalist, writer, and documentarian who has written extensively about individual spirituality as well as the role of religion in public and personal lives. As a social entrepreneur he has worked to aid the poor and marginalized both in America and in India “Trying Out the Dream: A Year in the Life of an American Family,” one of Wilkes’s early books, published in 1974, chronicled a prototypical average family. It was the basis for Wilkes’ television series, “Six American Families,” which won a DuPont Columbia award in 1976 for documentary excellence. The book and series were among the first to tell a larger story of the interplay in human lives by intensely focusing on one subject family. A practicing Catholic for much of his life, Wilkes wrote about epochal changes in the lives of Catholics and the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965. His book, “In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest,” which began as a New Yorker profile, won a Christopher Award in 1990. Sensing a disconnect between rigid Church teachings -- which stressed uniformity and obedience to clerical dictates -- and a newly enfranchised Catholic laity, he created the New Beginnings series, which thousands of parishes and churches employed to bring congregants into a more socially involved and spiritual life.