Sad news about Fr. Neuhaus. I didn’t know him well, but from time to time I would call him up to ask him something or other. And I agree that his column “The Public Square” was an ongoing masterpiece. He would have made an extraordinary blogger, which is sort of what “The Public Square” was: a blog-like column.

The name of the column came from The Naked Public Square, one of his books. Several years ago, I wrote an article for Philanthropy magazine called “Eight Books that Changed America (and the philanthropists who made them possible).” One of the books on the list was The Naked Public Square. Here’s an extract:

The Naked Public Square, by Richard John Neuhaus (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984). “I have the fortune and misfortune of my book titles really catching on,” says Richard John Neuhaus—the author of two books, The Catholic Moment and The Naked Public Square, whose titles really have caught on. Both are noteworthy, but the latter has the distinction of probably being the most important book written on religion and public life in the last quarter-century. It is simply not possible to enter a serious discussion on American church-state relations without accounting for this work.
“The naked public square is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business,” wrote Neuhaus, who was then a Lutheran minister and well known for his antiwar activism in the 1960s. (He is now a Catholic priest and editor of the journal First Things.) The book is ostensibly a critical but sympathetic look at the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s, back when it was called the Moral Majority—but it’s much more besides.
The Naked Public Square is vintage Neuhaus, at once chatty and highbrow, mixing colloquial expressions with philosophical allusions. Neuhaus can take his time to make a point, but when he makes it, he makes it with force and vigor. “It is a perverse mindset that insists that the relationship between church and state must always be one of conflict and confrontation,” he writes. And yet this is indisputably a prevailing mindset among many of America’s culture setters.