Happy New Year!

I salute Richard John Neuhaus for his December FT's article, Our American Babylon and his comments in The Public Square: A Survey of Religion and Public Life, specifically What Might Have Been. Unfortunately they are not on-line yet, but should be very soon. I shall alert you when it is if you are not a FT's subscriber or buy it off the news-stand. This article, as all of his articles are, is very nuanced. It's obvious to anyone who reads Fr. Neuhaus that he has thought deeply about the questions and the answers to those questions that many of us are so concerned with. What does it mean to be a Catholic in America? It's something that is especially a concern or a passion that Christopher Blosser and I share with many others including Stephen Hand. As a way to honor the work that Fr. Neuhaus has done over the years with FTs and ECT (Evangelicals and Catholics Together) I have dedicated the Book of Week to him and I have added him to the Contemporary Thinkers on my left column along with some other orthodox Catholic thinkers (Oakes, Weigel, Novak & Percy).