Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhauswas a prominent Christian clericand writer. Born in Canada, Neuhaus moved to the United States where he became a naturalized United States citizen. He was the founder and editor of the monthly journal First Things and the author of several books, including The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World, and Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth. A staunch defender of the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 May 1936
CountryUnited States of America
Richard John Neuhaus quotes about
For paradise we long. For perfection we were made...This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives...This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for...nothing less than perfect communion with the...one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together...we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled...The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less.
My eyes are wide open to the conflicts within the Church, but I don't think you can call it schism.
If a church offers no truth that is not available in the general culture - in, for instance, the editorials of the New York Times or, for that matter, of National Review - there is not much reason to pay it attention.
Religion as a human phenomenon is as riddled through with potential for both good and evil as any other phenomenon.
Optimism is a matter optics, of seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don't want to see. Hope, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue. It is the unblinking acknowledgment of all that militates against hope, and the unrelenting refusal to despair. We have not the right to despair, and, finally, we have not the reason to despair
Determined secularists view these as residual inconsistencies that they have not yet go around to extirpating and that may not be worth bothering about... Form the secularist perspective it may be that the essential battles have been won and excessive zeal in pressing a final mopping-up operation might only excited further public hostility.
Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.
In legal parlance, that is called 'the rational person test,' ... That's where somebody else says, 'Even though we have no idea what this person would want in this circumstance in which they cannot themselves tell us what they want, a 'rational' person - meaning, myself - in that circumstance would want to die.' So you move very quickly from so-called voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia. These legal and medical developments are not simply hypothetical They're in the courts right now.
One must never underestimate the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.
Respect for the dignity of others includes treating them as rational creatures capable of being persuadad by rational argument, even in the face of frequent evidence to the contrary.
In the gay (Catholic) community, it would seem, the maxim is: love the sin and love the sinner, but hate anyone who calls it a sin or him a sinner.
I do believe that those who compare the religious Right to the Nazis have fallen victim to polemical heat prostration.
Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.
My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.