New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait says reform conservatives such as Peter Wehner are “trying to coax the Republican Party back toward sanity” but argues that Wehner undervalues the “apocalyptic strain” in right-wing rhetoric.
Peter Wehner
By Matthew Balan | January 8, 2009 | 5:28 PM EST
The conservative movement lost a great intellectual voice on Thursday. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus died due to complications from cancer at the age of 72. Neuhaus, a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of New York, was a well-known pro-life advocate, and founded First Things in 1990, a periodical focused on advancing “a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”
We thought you might be interested in the tribute which Peter Wehner, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote on National Review Online’s Corner. It is excerpted below:
...[We] have lost one of America's leading public intellectuals, a man of profound wisdom and learning, and a great champion for the unborn. It was Father Neuhaus, along with his dear, long-time friend George Weigel and just a handful of others like Michael Novak, who not only championed the pro-life cause for so many years, but who gave the rest of us both the grounding and the vocabulary to speak on this issue.