Richard John Neuhaus

Minister and writer, born in Pembroke, Ontario, Canada. A minister's son, he left home at age 14 and succeeded in business before he became the Lutheran pastor of a largely black congregation in Brooklyn, NY (1961–78). Active in the protest movements of the 1960s, he became more conservative in response to later events, maintaining that the Moral Majority groups were correct in their emphasis, if not in their methods. He converted to Catholicism and wrote The Catholic Moment (1987). He became director of the Centre on Religion and Society (1984).

Father Richard John Neuhaus is a North American Catholic writer.

Originally from the Ottawa Valley of Ontario, Canada, Neuhaus was born in Pembroke, Ontario, on May 21, 1936. Ordained a Lutheran minister, Neuhaus was pastor of a poor congregation in a minority area of New York City. He is the originator of "Neuhaus's Law" which states that "Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed".

Neuhaus was a scholar at the Rockford institute before being fired in 1989. He then founded First Things, a journal published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, as an ecumenical neoconservative journal.

Neuhaus supported the mainline (ELCA) wing of American Lutheranism before converting to Catholicism in 1990. He was a commentator from Rome for the Catholic cable TV network EWTN during the final illness and death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI.

He promotes ecumenical dialogue and social conservatism. some Catholics and evangelicals claimed that Neuhaus and Colson had compromised major doctrines to promote a neoconservative agenda and unfairly demanded that both branches of Christianity stop trying to convert the other's members.