As founder and editor-in-chief of First Things, Father Richard John Neuhaus argued with verve and sophistication for twenty years about the relation of politics and religion, with an eye to reinstating the place of religion as a humanizing force in a society fast becoming a “naked public square.” His interest in the proper relation between religion and politics developed early in his intellectual training under his Lutheran father and his Missouri Synod teachers, as he demonstrated keen intelligence and a penchant for arguing about everything. He was convinced that culture shaped politics and was rooted in religion. He expected Protestant and Catholic clerical leaders to encourage their people to assume their responsibilities for their shared public life. Not seeing much response from the Lutherans in the 1960s, he took up the civil rights cause with the Left and tried to model his ideas as a pastor of a racially integrated church in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Speaking up for black civil rights and joining with ecumenical leaders like Martin Luther King, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Daniel Berrigan, Neuhaus moved—or better, jumped—onto the national stage promoting the link between religion and politics at every turn. He became disillusioned by the increased violence of the Left’s Vietnam War protests and their lack of a coherent argument. He eventually found his home with the humane goals of the Right a decade after William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history in the 1950s. As a brilliant polemicist gifted with “outsized charisma and outpacing