He was the greatest reader I ever met. The greatest reader, and a cigar smoker, and a walker, and a preacher, and a brewer of some of the worst coffee ever made. What odd items the mind latches onto in moments of grief: the tilt of a friend's head, the way he used his hands when he spoke, an awful meal shared a decade back, a conversation about a book only a month ago.

Only a month ago--it was only a month ago that he was still whole, still sharp, still himself. Novels and movies always seem to me to get it wrong. Grief doesn't conjure up ghosts. Grief renders the world itself ghostly. The absent thing alone is real, and in comparison, all present things are pale, gray, and indistinct: a vague background to the sharp-edged portrait of what is gone.

And, oh, what sharp edges Richard John Neuhaus had. He wrote and wrote and wrote--a discipline of writing that almost every other writer I know has told me feels almost like an indictment: 30 books, and innumerable essays, and all those talks he flew around to give. And, just as an incidental, 12,000 words a month poured out in the column, The Public Square, that anchored every issue of First Things, the magazine he founded.

He loved to tell the story of the time when he was complaining--boasting, really, in the guise of complaining, the way young men do--about how busy he was and how he didn't want to fly to Cincinnati

That was back in his radical 1960s days, of course, when he was the Lutheran pastor of a large, mostly black congregation in Brooklyn and, together with Rabbi Heschel and Fr. Daniel Berrigan, had founded one of the largest antiwar groups, Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. He was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr., a McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention, and a radical candidate for Congress in 1974. He was also, in those days, the author of an essay called "The Thorough Revolutionary," which proclaimed: "A revolution of consciousness, no doubt. A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes."

He could always turn a phrase, couldn't he? But it's a long way from there to being the Catholic priest of whom, on all the life issues, George W. Bush would say, "Father Richard helps me articulate these things." This journey from left to right has become the received account of Fr. Neuhaus's life: the narrative you can read in all the obituaries over the last few days, the problem of his biography that so many commentators have set themselves to explain since he died on January 8.