Father Owen Kearns LC (whose own brief remembrance of Neuhaus is here) pointed out that Father Richard John Neuhaus writes about himself not once but twice in the new First Things.
His final item in “While We’re At it” announces his cancer and accepts that death may come of it. But his first item remembers Cardinal Dulles in words that could just as easily be applied to Father Neuhaus:
“Avery Cardinal Dulles, the closest of collaborators and friends, died December 12 at age ninety in the infirmary of the Jesuit residence at Fordham University. Avery Dulles was a master of the Catholic theological tradition by which he was mastered and which he joyfully served. He combined erudition, intellectual intensity and ecclesial fidelity in a lifelong devotion to the Church, joined to a wry sense of humor and disarming humility about his part in the grand scheme of things. Generations of Christian thinkers have been placed in his everlasting debt. You can be sure that there will be much more about Avery Dulles in these pages. For the moment, we thank God for love’s fire that burned to the end, and we pray that the truth to which he bore witness is now opened to him in the fullness of the Beatific Vision for which he longed with nothing less than everything.”
— Tom Hoopes