Richard John Neuhaus

The Public Square Surveys provide additional evidence that Americans are returning to “traditional values.” Traditional values is usually a synonym for common sense or moral platitudes. Such sense is common and such morality is platitudinous because they are powerfully confirmed and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square In our March issue, George Weigel offered a comprehensive, incisive, and, it must be admitted, devastating examination of “The Churches and War in the Gulf.” In times of war, it has been said, truth is the first casualty. There is something to that. But times of great . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square We need not speculate about what may be down “the slippery slope” on which we find ourselves. The truly ominous changes are the stuff of our daily newspapers. These things are happening now. Consider the much discussed case of Nancy Cruzan. On December 15, 1990, the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square The Search Institute is located in Minneapolis, and it succeeded in inducing the Lilly Endowment and six denominations to give it big bucks to study the “faith maturity” of members of Protestant congregations. (If you are one of those busybodies who wants to know where . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Almost nobody wants to be called a prude and reactionary, a bluenose puritan and spoilsport. It would not be accurate to say that nobody wants to be perceived that way. Some, when they have been called reactionary once too often, embrace the epithet and exult in it. When he . . . . Continue Reading »

IVoltaire took pleasure in publishing the last will and testament of his friend Jean Messelier: “I should like to see, and this will be the last and the most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.” The anti-religious passion . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public SquareSo you’re not an editor? Lucky you. We were just going to press with an issue that included an outstanding article by Father Paul Mankowski, S.J., on the second draft of “One in Christ Jesus: A Pastoral Response to the Concerns of Women for Church and Society.” The . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Robert Bellah of the University of California, Berkeley, is surely among the most influential commentators on religion and American public life. In the late sixties he was instrumental in reviving the discussion about “civil religion”—a discussion that still goes . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square No one should be surprised that decisions of great constitutional moment are sometimes occasioned by cases that seem trivial or exotic. Those who are threatened by the majority sentiment of the moment appeal to the Constitution, although not always successfully. There was, for . . . . Continue Reading »

The question is: What are the theological resources of the Christian tradition for understanding the production of wealth? The answer is: Apparently there are none. Apparently. That is, were one to run through a hypothetical index of two millennia of Christian theology looking for entries under the . . . . Continue Reading »