Richard John Neuhaus

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 »

caThe 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 “Disciples” in 1832, and it . . . . 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. . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square One doesn’t want to make too much of a fifth anniversary, but neither is it nothing. Just surviving for five years is something. Most new journals do not manage that. First Things has not only survived but has flourished, and continues to grow in readership and by every measure . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public SquareThe Guardian, a British paper, has a man in Washington named Martin Walker and he reviews two books on the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy. One by Senator John Danforth, Resurrection, takes Thomas’ side, and the other by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice, takes . . . . Continue Reading »

The Public Square Hardly had heads stopped shaking in the publishing world over the astonishing sales of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church in the United States (some three million copies in the first few months) than along comes Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Knopf put out more than eight . . . . Continue Reading »