If the quintessential modern impulse is to separate — to sever faith from
reason, morality from politics, and spirituality from community and history —
then the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus was not a modern man. He was something
different and better. And when the 72-year-old public intellectual died last
week, America lost a rare treasure: someone who specialized in making
connections.

A prolific author, civil rights advocate and
Protestant-pastor-turned-Catholic-priest who attended St. Louis' Concordia
Seminary, Neuhaus had a knack for thinking big and finding common ground. His
ecumenical and interfaith initiatives united Protestants and Catholics and
Christians and Jews in common cause and candid conversation. His erudite
journal, First Things, convened some of the nation's brightest thinkers for the
sort of spirited debates about ultimate questions that are rare in today's
hyper-specialized academy. His dozens of books and countless articles probed
links between things our modern minds tend to divide: spirit and intellect,
religion and politics, private conviction and public ethic.

Neuhaus' life story was a fabric woven of many disparate threads. He was a
native Canadian who became a deeply patriotic if critical American citizen. He
was a second-generation Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism without
repudiating the good he saw in his former affiliation. And he was a prominent
civil rights activist who took up the pro-life cause in the 1970s for the same
reason that he had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the
1960s: He believed that all human beings are equal in God's eyes.

Through the years, Neuhaus' outspoken defense of the unborn and disillusionment
with leftist politics cost him the companionship of many friends from his
activist days. Yet where critics saw an abrupt lurch to the right, Neuhaus saw
consistency. As he told The New York Times, "All my life, I have prayed to God
that I should remain religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically
liberal and economically pragmatic."

The political liberalism that Neuhaus championed was one rooted in moral truth
and open to the transcendent perspective of religious faith. When liberalism
loses that foundation, Neuhaus argued, democracy falters and human rights are
imperiled. Politics ceases to be the deliberation about how we ought to order
our life together. It becomes instead a brutal contest in which who's weak and
who's strong matter more than who's right and who's wrong.

Neuhaus saw this perversion of democratic ideals dominating what he famously
labeled "the naked public square," a secularized civic realm in which religious
voices are unwelcome and an all-powerful state eventually arrogates to itself
the authority to decide the values by which we will live. In writings that
married intellectual gravitas with razor-sharp wit, Neuhaus labored to advance
an antidote for the naked public square: "a religiously informed public
philosophy" that respects both the religious character of Americans and the
demands of a pluralistic society.

Although a feisty debater quick to comment on the day's controversies, Neuhaus
maintained a big-picture perspective. When I last saw him in 2007, while
interviewing him for my Eternal Word Television Network show, "Faith &
Culture," he was in good spirits despite recent elections in which his beloved
pro-life cause had fared poorly. When I asked him about this, he cautioned
viewers against getting "chewed up" by our 24-hour news cycle. Defending the
dignity of the human person requires detachment from immediate results, Neuhaus
said. "We're in this for the long term.… We have no right to despair and we
have no reason to despair."

Neuhaus embodied that joyful detachment. His comprehensive knowledge, passion
for dialogue and refusal to separate goods that he believed belong together
were great gifts to his adopted nation. Now bereft of his formidable presence,
our American public square feels naked indeed.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.