There have been several reports indicating that Richard John Neuhaus is not long for this world. His illness brings into focus the remarkable trajectory of his life, from his friendship with Martin Luther King and furious opposition to the Vietnam War to his at times pugnacious neo-conservative work at First Things. At his best, Father Neuhaus has been a writer able to write both charitably and with great rigor and sharpness (no easy feat). On political issues, I am often well (sometimes very well) to his Left, and I have been more than a little frustrated at his unwillingness to take issue with the Bush administration on torture and preemptive war. That said, like many others I have been impressed and edified by his work on life issues, and above all, by his writing on contemporary Catholicism. His body of writing also expresses a more personal achievement: as a man of the Sixties Left, he refused to drift into being a kind of senescently benign, undiscriminating beautiful-soul progressive, and that is a brave and difficult thing, whatever my disagreements with his present politics. It is not easy to break with one’s youth, and all the friendships and loyalties it comprises. It takes rare courage and intellectual integrity to stay faithful to one’s sense of the truth against the grain of one’s life and loyalties, and even more difficult to remain faithful to this love of the truth without becoming a misanthrope or a scold.
The challenge of Christian writing on contemporary life is learning how to precisely, sharply, vigorously tell the truth in love. Whatever their virtues, contributors to Commonweal and First Things struggle to achieve this unity, though each has its own distinctive struggle. I’ll write more about that later. But for now, I join others in thanks and appreciation for the good work of Father Neuhaus.
