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That is, when the emperor has no clothes, the most effective thing to do is point. There's a place, I think, for the sort of careful, irenic engagement that Rowan Williams gave even to Don Cupitt and Jack Shelby Spong. But at times, RJN could accomplish just as much if not more with a swift, well-turned jab of a sentence or two. Of course, the danger for satirists is that of forgoing careful engagement and Christian charity. But overall, I don't think Father Neuhaus could be faulted for that. He was a man of many opinions, but he was a careful reader and, above all, a man who cared about the truth.

In fact, Father Neuhaus cared so much about the truth that he spent his life following after it, arguing about it, writing and advocating and bearing witness to it. And the truth took him to some very unexpected places: caring for the poor in a hard-luck Lutheran church in Brooklyn; marching for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr.; criticizing religious liberals for trading the gospel in for the onward march of the secularizing Left; standing against the legalized murder of abortion; and, finally, conversion to Catholicism. I remember him telling stories about meeting with the pooh-bahs of the religious Left in Upper Manhattan, some of which wound up, alongside him and Abraham Joshua Heschel, standing alone for preserving the core commitments of the faith against those who would rather have discarded them in the name of progress.

More than once, when discussion at the office turned to the intellectual, political, or theological trend of the moment, RJN would get a familiar, amused look on his face — a half-grin, raised eyebrow, and mischievous twinkle in his eyes that said, "I've seen this sort of thing before." Fads meant little to Father Neuhaus, and he knew well how much the allure of intellectual fashion and the approval of the "right people" could blind one to the truth. He came to be dismissed by some as simply another "conservative." But I daresay that much of what he said will, given time, prove more enduring than the several fashions with which he was out of step. Not least among his unfashionable stands was his clarion call to the churches to stand against the evil of abortion — a call that, sad to say, is too often muted for fear of what the right people will think. Father Neuhaus would have none of it.

Others have spoken much more and much better than I have. Father Neuhaus was perhaps best known for his lifelong spooling-out of his book The Naked Public Square, in which he contended that banishing religion from the debate of American democracy amounted to excluding the voices of millions of Americans. For this, he was labeled a "theocon," mostly by those who preferred that religious people just keep to themselves and let the enlightened few run things. Often lost in the debate was his lifelong attempt to teach religious people how to bring their convictions to bear with people with whom they disagree. The Catholic synthesis of faith and reason was of deep importance to Father Neuhaus; not for nothing did he point to Pope Benedict's Regensburg address and Pope John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio as fundamental documents for the sort of public religious engagement he was talking about.

Many, both religious and secular, disagreed with Father Neuhaus throughout his long career, but no one could have ever accused him of being insular, fundamentalist, sectarian, or unreasonable. I have never known another person who read so eclectically and deeply. Particularly in his Public Square column, RJN carried on a brilliant engagement with all comers for years and years. "Everything," he was fond of saying, "is in the Public Square someplace." Indeed, it was: Christian faith, for him, was not the antithesis of reason but its very foundation, the condition of its possibility. He spent a lifetime on a journey of discovery.

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January (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53