Book: "American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile," Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

• “[T]he Catholic Church is not above the fray, but neither is she captive to the fray. Her chief political contribution is to provide a transcendent horizon for our civil arguments, to temper the passionate confusions of the political penultimate with the theological ultimate, and to insist that our common humanity and gift of reason are capable of deliberating how we ought to order our life together."
• “In the view of [Alasdair] MacIntyre and other, the Enlightenment project has failed on its own terms…[I]t failed to produce an ethics to which any rational person, acting rationally, must give assent. Society was for a time able to live off the capital of earlier traditions of virtue, but now that capital has been depleted, the failure of the Enlightenment project has been widely advertised, and the time has come round at last for the triumph of nihilism.”
• “The new barbarians are not barbarians because they are unsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removed themselves from what I have called the civilizational circle of moral conversation. In simpler terms, we may speak of “traditional values.” The barbarians refuse to be limited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received, about good and evil, right and wrong. From them, the past is merely prelude.”
• “It is true that the Constitution establishes a secular order of government…To say that this government is secular is to say that it is for the present time; it is a temporal order. It is for the city of man, not the City of God. The American founders did not establish this constitutional order to be a church, although for some secularists it may be the closest thing they have to a church.”
• “There is considerable truth in the observation that politics is primarily a function of culture, that at the heart of culture is morality, and that at the heart of morality are those commanding truths typically associated with religion…Unless tempered by the virtue of civility, the metaphor of “culture wars,” in which commanding truths are pitted against each other, can easily lead to a circumstance in which politics degenerates into warfare that is not merely metaphorical…which in America means not warfare between religions but between opposing visions of the common good prosecuted with religious fervor, with one side unfurling its battle banners against ‘theocracy,’ and the other against ‘the dictatorship of relativism.’”
• “It would seem obvious that the human good is served by respect for human dignity. But this obviously is not obvious to all. The argument is sharpened if we speak not of human dignity but of the dignity of the human person. The phrase human dignity may suggest the human collective and include efforts such as taking technological charge of the evolution of the human species. The dignity of the human person places the accent on the individual – although, to be sure, the individual situated in society, and one hopes, in society that aspires to being community.”
• Re: Human Dignity. “In a world indelibly marked and marred by the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and myriad other crimes against humanity, a political consensus as a placeholder against great veils, no matter how intellectually rickety its structure, is not to be scorned."
• “In a world that continues to be dominated by libido dominandi – the unbridled lust for power and glory – politics is an instrument for the restrain of great evil.”
• “A human being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect at every point of development, debilitation or decline by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the spiritual principle of the soul, with reason and with free will, the destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God. This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected defended and indeed revered.”
• “Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see. Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don't want to see. Hope is only hope when it is hope with eyes wide open to all that challenges hope."
• “Despite all, we cling to the belief that we are unique persons, acting and hoping and aspiring in ways that have consequence, maybe even eternal consequence. That belief is mocked by the elemental forces of determinism, and mocked unanswerably, or so it seems to many, by the reality of death. Posited against death’s edict of ultimate meaninglessness, we unfurl the banner of hope for “eternal life”…Eternal life is not this life continuing without end. Eternal life is the fulfillment anticipated by all that is good, true and beautiful in this life.”
• “We must not think that the totalitarian catastrophes of that unhappy century are safely consigned to the past. The utopian impulse is deeply embedded in the human heart, and we can be sure that there is today a counterpart to Karl Marx working away in the British Library, or, more likely, in some biotech laboratory, contriving a plan for the reaction of a home in history that will satisfy our longing for home.”
• “As Christians and as Americans, in this our awkward duality of citizenship, we seek to be faithful in a time not of our choosing but of our testing. We resist the hubris of presuming that it is the definitive time and place of historical promise or tragedy, but it is our time and place. It is a time of many times: a time for dancing, even if to the songs of Zion in a foreign land; a time for walking together, unintimidated when we seem to be a small and beleaguered band; a time for rejoicing in momentary triumphs, and for defiance in momentary defeat; a time for persistence in reasoned argument, never tiring in proposing to the world a more excellent way; a time for generosity toward those who would make us their enemy; and, finally, a time for happy surrender to brother death – but not before, through our laughter and tears, we see and hail from afar the New Jerusalem and know that it is all time toward home.”