Fr. Neuhaus: A Round-up of Remembrances

I’ve just about given up trying to wrangle my thoughts about the life’s work of Richard John Neuhaus, who died yesterday, into some form of coherent thoughts, so I’ve opted for the coward’s escape: a compilation of a few of the more interesting things that have been written about him today. As you’ll see from them, Father Neuhaus was a man who thought deeply and argued passionately (full of passionate intensity, his detractors might say) about the place of religion, and Judaism and Christianity in particular, in American public life.

First Things itself has a comprehensive selection of the obituaries that appeared in this morning’s papers.

Among those in the First Things list is Ross Douthat’s understanding of Father Neuhaus’s life’s work: “No modern intellectual did so much to make the case for the compatibility between Christian belief and liberal democratic politics.” There were perhaps, of course, a few partisan excesses committed along the way, “[b]ut these are things that can be said of all us who scribble for a living.”

Not so, says one-time Neuhaus colleague and repentant “theocon” Damon Linker. For Neuhaus, the partisanship and polemics were features, not bugs, of the perfidious theocon order. But that’s not to say that his thought was crude, or that it never showed signs of evolution. But there seemed to be two Father Neuhauses.

Nonsense on stilts, says Alan Jacobs in reply to Linker. He honors Neuhaus at the American Scene here.

Rod Dreher pays his respects, too, but in the service of seeing the man plain and true, he recounts the tale of how he was deeply unnerved by Neuhaus’s response to his reporting on the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandals. (But I think in the end Rod probably knows, at a gut level, where Father Neuhaus was coming from. After all, the abyss sometimes stares back, no?)

Having unloaded all these various contentions, I will make one observation of my own about Father Neuhaus. His recurring, lengthy column in First Things, “The Public Square”, struck me some seven or eight years ago as a sort of proto-blog, and the mark all bloggers should aspire to. It was wonder to behold—the fruit of a capacious, contentious, always restless mind. And even if he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the word “blogging” to describe what he did, even if the vast majority of bloggers out there would scoff at the idea that they’re trodding the same ground he traversed earlier, the blogosphere nevertheless owes a tip of the hat to Richard John Neuhaus.