Richard John Neuhaus

“The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch.” That is bracing stuff. Professor Fish makes a very important argument about, inter alia, religion, reason, liberalism, and tolerance. I will . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square In a rare departure from the utter originality of these pages, parts of this commentary appeared in the Wall Street Journal and other publications here and abroad. So you never recycle? —RJN In an interview with a network news program, I was explaining what the forthcoming visit . . . . Continue Reading »

The Catholic university is born from the heart of the church and borne by the mission of the church. A university that is not integral to the Christian mission will in time become alien to the Christian . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square There is no end to efforts to define what makes a book a classic. Inevitably, there is a strongly subjective element here. A book that one engages at a formative stage of his thinking may not be the greatest book on the subject, but it is the book that forever shapes one’s . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square A truly odd thing has happened this past year. Well, of course many odd things have happened, but nothing else quite like this readily comes to mind. We are witnessing a very major policy shift, with partisans on all sides making high-octane moral noises, and yet with few people . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square It was, if I recall, Evelyn Waugh who wrote about a Catholic gentleman whose idea of a perfect world was one in which he would have a new papal bull to read at breakfast every day. This year had some wags speaking about their membership in the Encyclical of the Month Club. . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), with about a million members, arises out of the Restoration Movement launched by Alexander Campbell (1788-1866). The body was formed by a merger between Barton W. Stone’s “Christians” and Campbell’s . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square The current round of controversies has everything to do with the political shock of November 8, 1994, and alarums over the perceived ascendancy of the Religious Right. As a result, some Jews have ratcheted up to an almost painful degree their antennae for the detection of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Fifty years ago, on April 9, a few weeks before the collapse of the Third Reich, and on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, shortly before his thirty-ninth birthday, was hanged at the Flössenburg prison camp. As a witness (i.e., martyr) and a theologian, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square With the enormous attention paid The Bell Curve, the book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray that is inevitably described as "controversial" (or worse), another book appearing about the same time, and addressing some of the same questions, went almost unnoticed. It . . . . Continue Reading »