Richard John Neuhaus

The Public SquareAlan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His latest book is further evidence of his right to be called the Alfred E. Neuman of the sociology of American religion. Like the mascot of Mad magazine, his all-purpose response is, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square There are in the press repeated references to “the rapidly growing lay protest movement, Voice of the Faithful.” There is indeed such an organization, but, as for “rapidly growing,” VOTF doesn’t seem to have moved much beyond the thirty to forty thousand range of the old . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square In the course of a “self-interview” in his book Signposts in a Strange Land , Walker Percy discussed his becoming a Catholic Christian. What attracted him, he said, was “Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that the other . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square I don’t know what to call this. It is certainly not, in any ordinary sense of the word, a review of Robert Louis Wilken’s new book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 368 pages,, $29.95). A reviewer is supposed to have a . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Call it a pause or a hiatus or a bump in the road or a dead end. Such are among the ways in which informed parties describe the present moment in what forty years ago was less problematically referred to as “the ecumenical movement.” There is no doubt that the search for a . . . . Continue Reading »

I write the day after military action was launched. What happens in the days and weeks ahead nobody knows, and any speculation would be dated by the time you read this. So there is no point in that. What can be known now, and is very much worth trying to understand, is how the several religious . . . . Continue Reading »

At the end of last month’s installment of this continuing rumination on Catholic trials and tribulations, I spoke of the Catholic center, asserting that “The center holds.” Is that more than a rhetorical ploy? After all, people who take a position generally like to claim that their . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Prejudice gets a very bad press, but one cannot live without it. On numerous questions, we have all made judgments that are “pre” our present encounter with the question. “No, thank you, I do not care for broccoli; and no, I’m not interested in revisiting the question.” . . . . Continue Reading »

When I was young and under the compulsion to affect a deeper experience of life than I had, I was fond of quoting Whittier’s sage-sounding observation that the saddest words of tongue or pen are simply these, “It might have been.” They can be words of profound regret and even bitterness about . . . . Continue Reading »

“Years ago,” writes John Leo in U.S. News & World Report, “an old friend, now deceased, was ordained a priest and joined a new community in the Midwest. My friend was homosexual, and it slowly dawned on me, on a visit out there, that the other priests in the house seemed to be gay too. So . . . . Continue Reading »