President, The Howard Center
Director, The Family in America Studies Center
Editor, The Family in America

Born 1949 in Des Moines, Iowa, Carlson received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Augustana College (1971) and his Ph.D. in Modern European History from The Ohio University (1978).  He is married and has four children.

From 1975 to 1978, Carlson served as Assistant Director, Governmental Affairs Office, Lutheran Council in the U.S.A. In 1979, he was a NEH Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Washington, DC). Later that year, he became Assistant to the President and Lecturer in History at Gettysburg College (Pennsylvania). In 1981, Carlson became Executive Vice President of The Rockford Institute (Illinois) and editor of the monthly, Persuasion at Work. In 1986, he assumed the position of Institute President, and publisher of Chronicles, The Family in America, and The Religion & Society Report. In July 1988, President Reagan appointed him to the National Commission on Children ("The Rockefeller Commission"), where he played a key role in crafting the Commission's 1991 "Final Report," Beyond Rhetoric. Carlson served as General Secretary and coordinator of The World Congress of Families, held March, 1997, in Prague, The Czech Republic. In October, 1997, he created and became President of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society.  He served as General Secretary of The World Congress of Families II, held November, 1999, in Geneva, Switzerland, with 1600 delegates.  He also serves on the Council on Families (New York), as a consultant to The Research Institute for the Family (The Russian Federation), and as a history team member of The Pew Foundation/Woodrow Wilson Center project on “the nature of the human person.” In October, 2002, Carlson took the additional post of Distinguished Fellow for Family Policy Studies at the Family Research Council (Washington, DC). Carlson has been a visiting scholar at Arbetarrorelsens Arkiv (Labor Movement Archive) in Stockholm, Sweden. He has received research grants from The Ohio University, The American Scandinavian Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Institute for Educational Affairs, and The Earhart Foundation.

Carlson's first book, Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis, was published in 1988 by Transaction Press (Rutgers University). The University Bookman called it "genuinely profound." Another volume, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis, came from Transaction in 1990. A review in Reason magazine declared it "the social policy book of the year." A third, From Cottage to Work Station: The Family's Search for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age, appeared from Ignatius Press in 1993. Critic William Kauffman labeled it "a brave and powerful book: a gimlet-eyed analysis with the force of a jeremiad” (a Second Edition of Cottage will be published by Transaction in 2003). His fourth book, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in 20^th Century America, came from Transaction in early 2000.  Barry Alan Shain of Colgate University called it a "an important book...deeply learned and finely researched…an excellent piece of intellectual history." A collection of Carlson’s essays appeared in Russian translation in May 2003, entitled Society, Family, Person and published at Moscow Lomonosov State University. A sixth book, ‘The American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, comes from ISI Books in Autumn 2003.

Carlson's longer essays are included in over thirty anthologies and in The Washington Post (Outlook Section), The Journal of Social Issues, Society, The Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, New Oxford Review, The Public Interest, Regulation, The American Enterprise, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Touchstone, The Cresset, Family Policy Review, The Human Life Review, Policy Review, This World, Intercollegiate Review, The University Bookman, Continuity: A Journal of History, Dialogue: A Journal of Theology, Small Farmers' Journal, Marknads Ekonomisk Tidskrift (Sweden), The Family in Russia, Communio, The Chesterton Review, Modern Age, Caelum Et Terra, and other periodicals. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, International Herald-Tribune, Detroit News, Atlanta Journal, and Chicago Tribune. He has been interviewed for the PBS News Hour, NPR ("Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," "Talk of the Nation”), Voice of America, ABC, CBS, and NBC News, MSNBC, CBN, CNN, C-SPAN, Australian, Czech and Polish TV, eight special PBS productions on family issues, and over 400 regional radio and television outlets. He is profiled in Who’s Who in America, 2003 and Contemporary Authors (2002).

Carlson has testified as an expert witness before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Family and Human Services, the U.S. Attorney General's Taskforce on Family Violence, The Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, Swedish Parliamentarians, and in State and Federal Court. He has lectured for Colgate University, Moscow Lomonosov University, City-University (Sweden), Hillsdale College, Grove City College, University of Wisconsin, The North American College (the Vatican), Wabash College, Franciscan University at Steubenville, Hastings College, Brigham Young University, Georgetown University, The Swedish Employers Federation, Thomas More Society of America, The Bishops of the American Lutheran Church, The Children's Defense Fund, The Kellogg Foundation, the North American Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, The Australian Family Association, The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, and The Civic Institute (Czech Republic). He has prepared commissioned research papers for the Institute of Medicine--National Academy of Sciences, The Kansas Crime Prevention Commission, and the U.S. Department of Education, and has been a consultant for the U.S. Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services.