I will have more to say about Richard John Neuhaus, who died yesterday at 72, next month in The New Criterion, but I wanted to take a moment now to register my sadness at his passing, admiration for his work, and gratitude for his friendship.
Many people reading this will know that Fr. Neuhaus founded and presided over First Things, our most vibrant journal devoted to religion, culture, and public life. Although now edited by the redoubtable Joseph Bottum, First Things naturally bears the stamp and impress of its creator. Month in and month out, Fr. Neuhaus populated “The Public Square,” a capacious section of the magazine that often ran to 20 pages or more. With an astonishing fluency and perspicacity, he would stride over the issues, personalities, and contretemps of the moment, moving with ease from arcane theological disputes to the demotic hurly-burly of the culture wars. It was an extraordinary performance.
Fr. Neuhaus was also the author of a shelf of important books. I well remember the deep impression that The Naked Public Square made on me when I first encountered it in the mid-1980s. He dramatized with awful clarity the Chestertonian truth that the forces of radical secularism, abetted by an activist judiciary, will regularly transform a civilization that championed freedom of religion into a culture whose gospel was freedom from religion.
Fr. Neuhaus spoke about this and other matters with a rare authority, grounded in faith, burnished by a logical tidiness, range of reference, and generous humanity that made his writing as wise as it was informative and engaging. I want to stress the humanity. Fr. Neuhaus was an able polemicist, eager and devastating in the defense of Catholic probity, but he was also a man of enormous kindliness and communicable good cheer.
There is much more to say about this exemplary public intellectual, but for now I wish simply to offer my condolences to his many friends and extended family at First Things.
Requiescat in pace.
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The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse
Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity
Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age
Tenured Radicals, NEW, EXPANDED EDITION FALL 2008! How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education
Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
Against the Idols of the Age
Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-First Century
The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age
Physics and Politics, by Walter Bagehot, edited with an
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9 Comments
1. David Thomson:Vatican II severely damaged the Roman Catholic Church. Richard John Neuhaus was one of the few sensible voices remaining in this large religious institution. It now mostly stands for the advancement of socialism and surrender to the forces of secularism. Anti-intellectualism and the contempt of Western values are now the norm. Fighting abortion is deemed embarrassing and anti-assimilationist.
Do you know what a Catholic usually means when saying they are “open to dialogue to the world?” It just means that these Uncle Toms will grovel at the feet of the “elites” of Harvard and Yale. They have zero interest in talking to conservative Jews and Protestants. I also became a subscriber once again to First Things about a month ago. It is very fine publication—even if you are not Catholic. Someone like Christopher Hitchens should find many of the articles intellectually challenging.
Jan 9, 2009 - 10:38 am 2. Dennis:What a great man and priest RJN was. The Public Square has been one of the higlights of every month throughout the decade I have been subscribing to First Things. My only quibble with First Things is that I have to wait two months for a new issues between June and September!
That he also left us such profound and moving meditations as Death on a Friday Afternoon and As I Lay Dying, in addition to his legacy at First Things, is something for which we should all be grateful. RIP
Jan 9, 2009 - 3:23 pm 3. Minerva:Thank you, Roger. He was a true priest.
Jan 9, 2009 - 7:42 pm 4. PA Cat:Many of us feel a profound sense of sorrow and loss at Fr. Neuhaus’ passing. But one small correction: RJN’s successor at First Things spells his last name Bottum.
Jan 9, 2009 - 8:31 pm 5. Jeri Neuhaus:The numerous articles, both kind and critical have helped me, one of many nieces and nephews of Fr. Neuhaus, see him as the public sees him. He will always be, to me, simply Uncle Dick. I will picture him sitting at the picnic table outside his cottage on the Ottowa River smoking his pipe and sipping his scotch. I will remember him guiding me through the Chronicles of Narnia in a long late night phone call in the early 80’s. I will hear him pray for his grand-nephew, Abraham in the little church in Pembroke while preaching to us of the true meaning of agape. I will remember trying, wholly unsuccessfully, to digest his earlier works (In Defense of People, Movement and Revolution). I will regret and accept that I did not know him as many others did. I will take comfort in remembering him simply as Uncle Dick.
Jan 10, 2009 - 8:41 am 6. Steynian 306 « Free Canuckistan!:[...] been politically much weaker and intellectually far less formidable”; Roger Kimball: “Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009” …. (nro, [...]
Jan 10, 2009 - 4:21 pm 7. Steynian 306:[...] been politically much weaker and intellectually far less formidable”; Roger Kimball: “Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009” …. (nro, [...]
Jan 11, 2009 - 1:52 pm 8. James Currin:The best testimony to a life well-lived is the testimony of such a large circle of Fr. Neuhaus’s friends. Nevertheless, an outsider to this circle may discern in their tributes a somewhat worrying thread of instability. The career of Fr. Neuhaus is more than a little reminiscent of that of another charismatic cleric of a couple of generations ago. I refer to the late Episcopal bishop, James Pike. His life was one of constant discontent with his religious faith, perhaps best exemplified by his chain-smoking—I seem to remember him with three lit cigarettes at one time. He came to a tragicomic end in the Israeli desert where he had ventured, with his young wife and a large bottle of coke to sustain him, in search of the origins of Christianity. When his rented car became lodged on a high center, and finding himself unable to penetrate the mystery of a car-jack, he wandered off in search of help, never again to be seen alive. His vigorous wife survived.
Jan 18, 2009 - 2:33 pm 9. ashok:I owe Father Neuhaus a lot for First Things – I had read National Review all throughout high school, and so while First Things wasn’t a “conversion experience,” it did introduce me to a lot of things that I was happy to share with others, such as Leon Kass’ fine speech “L’Chaim and its Limits.”
My only regret regarding this generation that is passing away – I’m thinking of Buckley, Weyrich and others – is that we on the Right have created the media, but not really worked to find the audience. We might need to humble ourselves for the sake of a legacy given to us – instead of expecting readers to come to us, we might have to get into “the public square,” the “agora,” and practice what we preach.
Jan 24, 2009 - 2:07 pm