He was an amazingly prolific writer, but the late Father Richard John Neuhaus was also finicky about writing. He would personally review the galleys of each issue of First Things, the journal he founded, which was one reason the magazine was a pleasure to read: it was edited, and re-edited, and then edited again. But Richard was particularly finicky about his books. Last August, in what turned out to have been the last of our twenty-two summer vacations together, he sat in his cottage on the Ottawa River and, pounding away on his beloved MacBookPro, edited, and reworked, and then re-edited the book that is now his posthumous literary valedictory -- American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile (Basic Books).

American Babylon is vintage Neuhaus, in several senses of the term. It deepens themes Richard had been exploring since Time Toward Home (1975) and The Naked Public Square (1984), especially the continually vexed question of Church-and-state. It includes perhaps his most developed reflection on the importance of living Judaism for Christianity. It takes up the cudgels in defense of life and sharply critiques the "immortality project" with which some scientists are obsessed.

There is a notable chapter on Richard Rorty, one of the most influential of contemporary American philosophers, whose pragmatic case for democracy Neuhaus found perilously thin. And there is the final version of a famous lecture to which Richard gave the deliberately provocative title, "Can an Atheist Be a Good Citizen?" (Answer: Yes, but only accidentally.)

Above all, and tying it all together, is Richard Neuhaus's profound conviction that this gloriously messy, often maddening, sometimes exhilarating business we call "living here and now" is time spent on the way to Somewhere Else -- "time toward home," as he called it in that earlier book, time toward the New Jerusalem, time toward life within the light and love of the Holy Trinity. Richard Neuhaus loved this life, as he loved New York City and as he loved America. Yet, above those loves and giving those loves meaning was his love of Christ and Christ's Church. For RJN was a radically converted Christian disciple who believed with the author of the Letter to the Hebrews that "here we have no lasting city," because everything about this city, about life here and now, is directed toward "the city which is to come" [Hebrews 13.14]. 

Now, as Richard often pointed out, it was precisely that loyalty to "the city which is to come" that makes serious Christians good citizens of a democracy -- or at least good citizens of a democracy that does not divinize itself. By reminding democratic citizens that democratic citizenship is penultimate -- for our ultimate citizenship is in the City of the Living God -- Christians can give politics its due while helping keep politics in its place. Which is an important place, but not the ultimate place. Indeed, the name for the kind of politics that takes politics with ultimate seriousness is "totalitarianism." It killed several hundred million people in the twentieth century.