Time Toward Home: Richard John Neuhaus for Our Time
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus loved to say that “when we get to heaven, there will be a sign over the pearly gates that reads: ‘The New Jerusalem—From the Wonderful People Who Brought You New York City.’” “And if you didn’t like New York City,” he would impishly add, “there will be another place to go.”
Fifteen years ago today, Fr. Neuhaus left the earthly New York for the heavenly city to which it pointed, leaving in his wake a hole in America’s public discourse. A sui generis activist-turned-intellectual, Neuhaus was, above all, a spiritual father, first as a Lutheran pastor and later as a Catholic priest. It was his ministry—beginning with an inner-city congregation in Brooklyn—that drove his political advocacy and incessant writing on religion and public life. When it came to those matters, President George W. Bush famously said that “Fr. Richard helps me articulate these things.” No Catholic thinker since could claim such praise from a president.
In the intervening years, the political and ecclesiastical landscape has deteriorated in ways Neuhaus could not have fully imagined. And yet his final book, whose publication he did not live to see, offers fitting counsel for us today. American Babylon reminds us what politics is and how Christians should think about their citizenship in this world and the next—about living as a people who are not at home but live in “time toward home.”
In American Babylon and his other works, Neuhaus defined politics as the process by which we deliberate “how we ought to order our life together.” This is more than a paraphrase of Aristotle. First, it teaches that politics is not a matter of philosophical speculation but practical reason. It is not about reaching the right metaphysical conclusions and building a perfect program from them. Rather, politics consists of acting for the good that is possible now, with all the messiness and compromise that might entail.