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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I can not believe i am the first to review, April 17, 2009
This review is from: American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile (Hardcover)
this book for Amazon.
I hope i am not assuming incorrectly that most of the readers of this review are familiar to a greater or lesser to degree, with the thinking and works of Richard John Neuhaus. Most of those who like/love him will enjoy this book; most of those who don't, will not like this book. Fr. Neuhaus's oevre is massive; I can only refer you to his journal First Things, for a more comprehesive understanding of his thought.
although this book must have been in the works for months, it takes special poignancy in the light of the passing of its author on January 8, 2009. Neuhaus takes special care over the book's title, discussing what it means for a Christian to be in exile in America in 2009. He takes great care to compare this with Jews in exile in Babylon in the 6th century before Christ.
The theme of the book is for Christians to take hope, that as bad as things might seem now, for the triumph of the [Judaeo] Christian Messiah and his family the Church, things have been worse. Hope is probably the single most central theme of the book, which is different from an effervescent optimism, but is anchored on the guaranteed truth of the death and resurrection of Christ.
The book is more of an homilitic exhortation than a reasoned thesis. I think the author wasted too many pages on the thought of Richard Rorty, but they can straighten that out at their respective destinations. For Fr. Neuhaus, to despair is to believe that the exile Christians now feel is permanent; for progressives, it is to to think that the utopian thoughts/feelings we have had are permanent.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A voice from the beyond, April 30, 2009
This review is from: American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile (Hardcover)
Fr.Neuhaus died Jan. 8, 2009. This is his last book and it read like a warning voice from the great beyond.. The "Babylon" of the title is not the "whore of Babylon" of excitable discussion but the place of Jewish exile from their home in Jerusalem. Fr. Neuhaus rolls his intellect over the question of how we should live as good citizens in exile from our true and promised home with our creator. You will find no better reflections on this question.
Especially enlightening is the chapter devoted to examining the philosophy of Richard Rorty. For those, like myself, who haven't been able to unravel the obtuse philosopher this chapter will be extremely rewarding in helping you see into the moral and philosophical confusion that so dominates our age.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Believers in Babylon, July 19, 2009
This review is from: American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile (Hardcover)
When Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) died of cancer, America lost one of its most public (and conservative) Christian intellectuals. The arc of his life had the look and feel of providence. Born in Canada, he became a naturalized American. A high school drop out, he advised George W. Bush. Ordained in the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, in the sixties he joined forces with Daniel Berrigan to engage civil rights issues as a pastor to a Brooklyn congregation of blacks and Hispanics. After Roe v. Wade in 1973, he began to turn rightward. In 1990 he converted to Latin Rite Catholicism, was ordained a priest, and founded the Institute on Religion and Public Life, and its journal First Things, whose mission statement is "to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society."
You don't have to agree with Neuhaus's unapologetic neo-conservatism to appreciate the vigor with which he engaged Christian identity in the public square. Yes, he denied communion to Catholic politicians whom he considered insufficiently pro-life. He refers to Pope John Paul "The Great" (74, 209). He vigorously defended natural law theory ("those things that we cannot not know"). He warmed up to Lincoln's notion of America as the world's "last best hope" and defended democratic capitalism. But there he is engaging Peter Singer's advocacy of infanticide and eugenics, or Richard Rorty's "liberal ironism" (this chapter alone is worth the whole book). He wonders aloud about the "new atheism" and whether atheists can be good citizens. He circles back to Augustine and Aquinas, Jefferson and Madison, then forward to Alasdair MacIntyre, Derrida, Newman and the Niebuhrs.
Drawing upon the theme of exile in Babylon, Neuhaus considers how believers must be very much in the world but not a worldly people, and how we must, as Jeremiah told the ancient Jews, "seek the welfare of the city" where God has placed us, and "pray to the Lord on its behalf." His "controlling argument" is that Christians live in hope between the Already of the kingdom inaugurated and the Not Yet of its consummation, rejecting both despair and presumption.
Despite his conservative boosterism, Neuhaus advises a "disciplined skepticism" about politics. He admits that Christian hope is "painfully provisional," and that theodicy admits to no "intellectually satisfying answer." Christians of both the mainline left and the conservative right, he says, have contributed to "the political corruption of Christian faith and the religious corruption of authentic politics." Faithfulness in exile can take many different forms. And whether believers have tried co-existence or accommodation with Babylon, separation, subversion, or even insurrection, Neuhaus credits all with good faith efforts, even though none of us have found ultimately satisfying solutions. And so we live in faith for what we have not and cannot see.
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