Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life

Pete Davis is a writer and civic advocate focused on strengthening American democracy and building solidarity and a spring 2026 fellow with the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. Davis is the co-founder of the Democracy Policy Network, a state policy organization focused on raising up ideas that deepen democracy, and is the co-director of Join or Die, a documentary on the work of civic guru Robert Putnam. 

His Harvard Law School graduation speech, “A Counterculture of Commitment,” has been viewed more than 30 million times — and was expanded into a book: Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in An Age of Infinite Browsing (2021). Davis is also the author of Our Bicentennial Crisis: A Call to Action for Harvard Law School’s Public Interest Mission (2017) and the co-author of How To Get Away: Finding Balance in our Overworked, Overcrowded, Always-On World (2018). His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Daily News, Aeon, the Guardian, Fast Company, America, and the Falls Church News-Press.