Richard John Neuhaus

It’s Columbus Day and Justice Antonin Scalia is the grand marshall of the parade down Fifth Avenue. He takes great satisfaction in being an Italian-American, and he knows how to strut with all the fun and none of the arrogance that goes into fine strutting. I confess he is among my favorite . . . . Continue Reading »

A number of readers have asked whether I will be responding to Garry Wills’ long article in the New York Review of Books (October 6) claiming that a few friends and I are manipulating the Vatican and the White House to create what he calls government by "the fringes." When the pope . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Some readers have complained that First Things, and I in particular, have had a great deal to say about just-war doctrine but relatively little to say about the application of that doctrine to the conflict in the Middle East. The reason is that just-war doctrine is central to the . . . . Continue Reading »

Year after year since the evil empire’s fall, the promise of Poland increases. If history is capable of decency, the world will forever acknowledge its debt to Poland for the gift of Karol Wojtyla, John Paul the Great”for his universal appeal was inextricably joined to the particularity . . . . Continue Reading »

And now for something completely different. Well, not completely different but different enough. For some time we’ve been discussing how to make this site even more useful. I assume it is already useful because it is used so much by so many. People more at home than I am in the ethereal worlds . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square In the many worlds of evangelical Protestantism today there is enormous vitality—including theological vitality. That makes possible substantive conversations, such as the project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT). Nobody has contributed more to that conversation . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square April 11: Remembering John Paul II There, on the catafalque only a few feet away, was what remained. Kneeling at the prie-dieu, I had only a few minutes, certainly no more than ten, to think what I wanted to think and pray what I wanted to pray in this moment I had so long . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square When the much-celebrated architect Philip Johnson died this year at age ninety-eight the obituaries made little or no mention of his politics. In the days following, some commentators took note of this glaring omission. To be more precise, the omission was glaring only to those who . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square That America is guided by Providence is a belief deeply entrenched in the seventeenth-century beginnings, the constitutional period, Lincoln’s ponderings on our greatest war, and Woodrow Wilson’s convictions about the inseparable connections between freedom and American . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square “As society became more modern, it became more secular.” That sentence has about it a certain “of courseness.” It or its equivalent is to be found in numerous textbooks from grade school through graduate school. The connection between modernization and secularization is . . . . Continue Reading »