I was trying to think of a good metaphor for Mike Woodford's role in the macro theory world. Dumbledore? But then I'd have to make someone be Voldemort, and I'm not that big of a jerk. Maybe Ed Witten? But far fewer people know who Witten is than know who Woodford is. I give up. Woodford is Woodford. And right now, at this moment in time, Woodford certainly seems like the most influential person in business-cycle theory. Maybe the most dominant influence since Robert Lucas.
One big challenge to the paradigm Woodford has built - which has won near-universal adoption at central banks - is the Neo-Fisherian idea. This is the idea that holding interest rates low for a very long time will either A) make the economy explode, or B) eventually cause persistently low inflation. Looking at the experience of Japan since 1990, (B) doesn't seem so crazy. John Cochrane explained the Neo-Fisherian idea in an epic blog post back in November, and the idea is supported by a more formal model by Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe. It's a big challenge to the Woodford paradigm because 1) the core of the idea is pretty simple, 2) it seems to fit with recent Japanese and possibly American experience, and 3) it says that central banks working in the Woodford paradigm are achieving the exact opposite of what they intend to achieve.
At the recent NBER Summer Institute, Woodford struck back. Actually that makes it sound too confrontational, since Woodford is the consummate nice guy. What he actually did was to address Cochrane's arguments directly, and give some reasons why he thinks they don't apply.
Basically, the assumption of infinitely-forward-looking agents creates big problems for macro models. Nakamura, Steinsson, and McKay show one particularly egregious example of this in a recent paper about forward guidance. Basically, models end up getting dominated by what people think will happen in the infinitely far future. 
The question of whether interest rates affect inflation in a Woodfordian way or a Neo-Fisherian way depends on what people think is going to happen at infinity. Woodford's new idea - which will certainly be a working paper soon - is that people don't really look all the way to infinity. He essentially puts bounded rationality into macro. He posits a rule by which expectations converge to rational expectations as conditions in the economy change.
So to all you guys who ask "When will behavioral economics have a big impact on macro?" The answer is: Right now. It just did. Behavioral macro is now a reality. (Well, really it was a reality with learning models like Evans and Honkapohja, or even Sargent, but Woodford is using it to think about policy in real time, for big stakes, and his presentation will undoubtedly be influential). 
Anyway, I don't understand everything about the new bounded-rationality Woodford model, but from reading his slides, here's what seems to be happening. A permanent interest rate peg ends up making the economy explode. When the peg begins, people think it's a temporary peg. As it continues, people never quite believe it's permanent, but their estimation of its duration keeps getting longer. This makes expectations of the eventual interest rate (infinitely far in the future) diverge, so the economy basically explodes.
So that's the theory, anyway. It's not clear how well this theory applies to Japan, or to other economies that have had very low interest rates for a while now. It's also not clear how well the macro world will accept a behavioral theory as the workhorse model for monetary policy. I guess we'll see, especially after the paper comes out and people (hopefully) start to fit it to data! In the meantime, expect a response from Cochrane. Should be interesting to watch.