Of course everyone in the English-speaking Catholic world knows that “Father Neuhaus” is Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and prolific writer, and that he died a couple of days ago. Francesca Murphy mentioned it in a comment (I’m not sure on which post), and I replied that I hadn’t posted anything about it because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, having some reservations about his work. I think it is fair to say that he was most prominent as a controversialist, and I sometimes disagreed with him. But never mind that now. Here is an essay on death which he wrote eight years ago, and which you really should read. It’s for such work as this that he will be most remembered, I think, after the controversies on which he thrived have become the province of historians.