Richard John Neuhaus

A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine L. Albanese Yale University Press, 640 pages, $40 If one is looking for a fascinating tour of the many sideshows of the carnival that is religion in America, Catherine L. Albanese is the guide you want. . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Body Worlds is an “educational” exhibition that has been touring major U.S. cities the past couple of years. I was surprised to read that a bishop whom I admire had given it his imprimatur, so to speak, in his diocesan newspaper. I asked him about it and he said he had . . . . Continue Reading »

Whatever the merits or demerits of Craig Raine’s new biography, T.S. Eliot , and Terry Eagleton thinks the latter far outweigh the former , it does raise once again the question of Eliot’s alleged misogyny and anti-Semitism. Eagleton thinks that question is settled, and not in . . . . Continue Reading »

One detects in some quarters a sense of inevitability about momentous changes in the ordering¯or disordering, as the case may be¯of society. Forty years, one may be inclined to think, is not a long time in the history of a culture and its foundational institutions. Forty years ago in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Some Muslims in America are unhappy with us. And apparently they know something I don’t. This from The American Muslim : "The most extreme and most sophisticated example of patronizing intolerance in contemporary America, because it most starkly illustrates the reversal of truth and . . . . Continue Reading »

I have not yet read Jeremy Cohen’s new book Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford). And it may be that Adam Kirsch, chief book editor for the New York Sun , misrepresents Cohen’s argument. So I’ll attend to Kirsch’s argument, which . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square   I don’t say that everybody has been waiting for it, but I was, and now it is out. The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by the distinguished journalist John O’Sullivan, packs into an engaging narrative the detail and color of . . . . Continue Reading »

‘Tis the season for commentary on Pope Benedict’s first year. On the frenzied left, John Cornwell (he of the Hitler’s Pope defamation) is among those writing that I am very unhappy with Benedict, which is nonsense. Cornwell, writing in the Times of London, says that I aspire to . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the most dramatic stories of religious and cultural change in recent American history is the collapse of what was viewed as the Protestant establishment. Its main institutional embodiment was the National Council of Churches (NCC) , established in 1950 as the successor to the Federal Council . . . . Continue Reading »

This evening (Monday) at eight o’clock, Fr. Leonard Klein will be the guest of Marcus Grodi on The Journey Home on EWTN.Klein was for many years a leader of the “evangelical catholic” movement in the Lutheran Church before being received into full communion and, several years . . . . Continue Reading »