Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by Randy Boyagoda, 399 pages

Boyagoda opens his book with two vignettes.  In 1960s New York, young men approach an altar and throw their draft cards into a bowl to be sent to the Pentagon while a Lutheran priest sings "America the Beautiful".  In 1990s Washington, at a Christian Coalition convention, a Catholic priest warns his audience to avoid confusing politics with the Gospel.  The two priests were both Richard John Neuhaus, and the continuity behind the change is as much the subject of this new biography as the changes themselves.

Throughout a long public career, Neuhaus marched with Martin Luther King Jr, was arrested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention for protesting against US involvement in Vietnam, advised Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and was listed by Time magazine as one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals" despite not being an Evangelical.  For over four decades he was a persistent voice for the inclusion of religious values in the public square.

In Boyagoda's sympathetic but not fawning account, what was of first and final importance to Neuhaus throughout his eventful life was his vocation as a pastor of souls and evangelist of the Gospel, whether reminding leftist radicals of the virtue of patriotism or Christian conservatives that voting Republican does not wash away sins.