We Have Lost a Giant: Richard John Neuhaus R.I.P.

Droll of wit, upright of character, lover of Christ.

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As First Things Editor Joseph Bottum wrote: “My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted. I weep, rather for all the rest of us.”

Our loss is truly great for a truly great champion of freedom, justice, and life has passed. His work as public intellectual was summed up thus by John Podhoretz editor of COMMENTARY:

Richard John Neuhaus, perhaps the most important and influential religious intellectual in the United States since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr, died last night. A Canadian by birth, he was a Lutheran pastor who came to the United States and served as the minister of a congregation in a poor Brooklyn neighborhood. A liberal in the model of Niebuhr, Neuhaus found himself migrating rightward once the Supreme Court inaugurated the age of abortion on demand with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1972. In 1984, he wrote the book for which he will be remembered, The Naked Public Square — a concise masterpiece about the role of religion in a democracy and the danger posed to a democratic society in the notion that public life should be effectively atheistic.