Like Barnes, Neuhaus is formidably intelligent and learned. Unlike Barnes, though, Neuhaus is grateful for this life and sanguine about the next. He describes his illness, his operations and his near-death experience in sometimes excruciating detail, yet the reader emerges uplifted. Neuhaus disagrees with Montaigne - and Barnes: "I believe," he writes, "that one learns how to die, not by philosophising, but by dying." It is only when death is imminent that we confront our helplessness and turn to God. "Nothing we can do can help now. That is the point."

Though he was friend and adviser to popes and presidents, Father Neuhaus was unimpressed by power and saw his vocation in helping the helpless. As a radical Lutheran pastor, born in Canada but deeply influenced by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, he devoted himself to working with the poor, especially poor blacks. Unlike Obama, Neuhaus knew King.

But after Roe v. Wade he came to see the cause of protecting the unborn child as the natural successor of the civil rights movement. His 1984 bestseller The Naked Public Square transformed the American debate on church-state relations, arguing that excluding religion from public life went against the spirit of the US Constitution. Ostracised by Left and Right, he thrived.

Having done more than any other American to bring together Catholics, Evangelicals and Jews, Neuhaus became increasingly persuaded that the disputes that lay behind the Reformation were no longer relevant. In 1990, he finally took the plunge and converted to Catholicism. He became the American Chesterton.

Ordained a priest in his mid-fifties, he found new energy, launching the monthly First Things, which quickly established itself as a leading voice in religious dialogue. The best thing in it was his compendious, pungent and invariably urbane column "The Public Square", in which he propounded his "law": "Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed."