A spiritual force: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and the reinvigoration of religious conservatism.(Biography)

IF you type "the naked public square" into Google, 0.41 seconds later you get access to 252,000 entries. My guess is that this greatly underestimates the number of times that this phrase has been quoted and the number of people it has influenced. Even so it confers immortality of a kind on whoever happened to coin it. According to Wikipedia, that person was Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who, while still a Lutheran pastor, wrote a 1984 book of that name arguing that the extreme secularist interpretation of the First Amendment had already led to the effective exclusion of religious argument from political debate and would in time foster an official hostility to religion that the First Amendment was written to prevent. In fact there are uses of the phrase earlier, some from Neuhaus himself, others by friends of his such as Irving Kristol. So it is likely that he coined it, but certain that he gave it common currency.

To achieve immortality as the author of a telling phrase might have mildly pleased Neuhaus, who was not without a justified pride in his writing, but it was not the sort of immortality in which he was really interested. Two of his most important books, Death on a Friday Afternoon and As I Lay Dying, deal both intimately and powerfully with the certainty that we will all die and hopefully with the promise that we will all enjoy a literal immortality thereafter.

Neuhaus felt that he had been given a special insight into that promise. Recovering from an illness that nearly killed him, he had something like an "out of body" experience in which messengers from God told him, "Everything is ready now." He took this to be not a summons but an assurance that, whether he lived or died in his illness, his essential work had been done.

When he did recover, determining never to doubt the reality of his experience, he became far more conscious of the ubiquitous presence of death in our lives. Children playing in the street, models walking to their next audition, neighbors saying hello as they left their homes--all were dying by degrees and had been since birth. Hobbling about New York as a convalescent, he had to stop himself from rushing up and warning them. Instead he wrote his books to do so, meditating on the meaning of death or, more precisely, on God's promise to overcome it.

We at NATIONAL REVIEW played a very modest walk-on role in this story. While still a Lutheran pastor, as Rick Brookhiser has recounted online, Richard became our religion correspondent. His Lutheranism was a qualification here. We had an informal rule that since NR was frequently mistaken for a Catholic magazine owing to our founder-editor's very public Catholicism, our religion editor should normally be a non-Catholic. Pastor Neuhaus performed superbly in that role until he became Father Neuhaus. His conversion was not a total surprise, of course, because he had long regarded Lutheranism as a reformist branch of the universal Catholic church. Deciding that Rome under John Paul II was steadily adopting the right kind of reforms, Richard became first a Catholic and then a Catholic priest. He had hoped, I think, to lead a larger contingent of Lutherans into the church. That didn't happen, but he did form a bridge between Catholics and all other Christians both before and after his conversion.

Richard also remained until much later NR's religion correspondent, and a friend and counselor to all of us on the magazine. During this time--and before his illness--I commissioned an article by him to contrast Hollywood's treatment of the next world in contemporary films such as Ghost with how it handled the same subject in the 1930s and 1940s. We dropped off several such videos at his apartment and waited confidently for a learned and witty article. That weekend he collapsed and almost died.

Meeting him months after his near-death experience, I said that we really hadn't intended him to do such extensive research. He gave a wan smile in reply. Maybe he felt I was dancing on a precipice without due care and attention. For Richard, as a good friend, would not shrink from telling his friends the spiritual truths he felt they needed to hear. That gave his friendship a bracing as well as an affectionate quality.