Irving Kristol, Catholic social ethicist?

Several years ago, after Irving Kristol had had a cancerous lung removed, Father Richard John Neuhaus visited him in the hospital. After they chatted briefly, Father Neuhaus, at the door on his way out, turned back toward the bed and said, “I’ll pray for you, Irving.” To which Irving Kristol replied, “Don’t bring me to His attention!”

It was a typical Irving remark: wry, modest, indomitable. For those with ears to hear, there was also the undertone of an act of faith. For Irving, whose practice of Judaism was not strict, was nonetheless, as he might put it, “theotropic”—intuitively persuaded that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (and, as some of us would remind him, Jesus) was indeed the Master of the Universe to which his ancestors in the shtetls of eastern Europe had prayed. Read more