Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Cardinal John O’Connor, whom Richard John Neuhaus called “my dear friend” and who received him into full communion with the Catholic Church in September 1990 at the chapel in his residence. Following are four tributes to the cardinal, beginning with one from Father Neuhaus Continue Reading » Continue Reading »
The path First Things founder Richard John Neuhaus followed from a Lutheran boyhood to the Catholic priesthood was a journey home. From the April 2002 issue. This is more a story than an argument. It is in some ways a very personal story, and yet not without broader implications. It is just . . . . Continue Reading »
This article by Richard John Neuhaus, who passed away January 8, 2009, was published in the February 1999 issue of First Things, and is reprinted below in honor of the feast day of Mother Teresa.A couple of years ago physicist Alan Sokal published an article in Social Text arguing in the most abstruse postmodernistic jargon that gravity, among other things, is a social construct. It was a hoax, of course, and when Sokol publicly revealed the fact it caused quite a sensation, heaping embarrassment upon the editors and their academic colleagues who had long since lost the capacity to discern the difference between rational discourse and their trendy gibberish. The academy was not amused… . Continue Reading »
Exploration into God is exploration into darkness, into the heart of darkness. Yes, to be sure, God is light. He is the light by which all light is light. In the words of the Psalm, “In your light we see light.” Yet great mystics of the Christian tradition speak of the darkness in which the . . . . Continue Reading »
This article by Richard John Neuhaus, who passed away January 8, 2009 , was published in the August/September 2008 issue of First Things , and is reprinted below on the one-year anniversary of Pope Benedict’s visit. In saying that one must guard against superlatives in recounting Pope . . . . Continue Reading »
Richard John Neuhaus died on January 8, 2009, at the age of seventy-two—a great loss to the magazine, to American public discourse, and to his many friends. We present here a previously unpublished essay, “The One True Church,” which he wrote in New York during his last months, together with a . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ll presume to call it Neuhaus’s Law, or at least one of his several laws: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. Some otherwise bright people have indicated their puzzlement with that axiom but it seems to me, well, axiomatic. Orthodoxy, no matter how . . . . Continue Reading »
As with most academic traditions, and especially those that are viewed as soft, there are orthodoxies and fashions, and sometimes sudden turns, that are conventionally described—following Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions of almost half a century ago—as paradigm shifts. . . . . Continue Reading »
The Public SquareWhen I was a young Lutheran seminarian, I was struck by a professor’s forceful declaration that the phrase growth in grace is a contradiction in terms. The grace of the gospel of forgiveness is absolute, unqualified, perfect. It allows for no growth or improvement. The law of . . . . Continue Reading »
This essay by Richard John Neuhaus, who passed away January 8, 2009 , was originally printed in the February 2003 issue of First Things .In 1987, while I was still a Lutheran, I published a book titled The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World . There I argued that the . . . . Continue Reading »
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