This classic of Christian apologetics seeks to persuade the skeptic that there are good reasons to believe in God even though it is impossible to understand the deity fully. First written over a century ago, the Grammar of Assent speaks as powerfully to us today as it did to its first readers. Because of the informal, non-technical character of Newman's work, it still retains its immediacy as an invaluable guide to the nature of religious belief. A new introduction by Nicholas Lash reviews the background of the Grammar, highlights its principal themes, and evaluates its philosophical originality.
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, reprinted from the 1878 edition, is rightly regarded as one of the most seminal theological works ever to be written, states Ian Ker in his foreword to this sixth edition. It remains, Ker continues, the classic text for the theology of the development of doctrine, a branch of theology which has become especially important in the ecumenical era.
John Henry Cardinal Newman begins the Essay by defining how true developments in doctrine occur. He then delivers a sweeping consideration of the growth of doctrine in the Catholic Church from the time of the Apostles to his own era. He demonstrates that the basic rule under which Christianity proceeded through the centuries is to be found in the principle of development, and he emphasizes that throughout the entire life of the Church this principle has been in effect and safeguards the faith from any corruption.
The Idea of a University illuminates St. John Henry Newman's timeless and accessible defense of a Catholic liberal education.
St. John Henry Newman and his influence on theology, religion, and education continues to benefit us today. The Idea of a University, one of his pinnacle works, collects his lectures about the intertwined strength of the Catholic Church and the liberal university. Within these discourses, Newman lays out arguments for the essence of a Catholic University and the benefit to students and the world as a whole. He writes not for only Catholics but for all readers, appealing to truth and fact before expounding upon reason and examples. The Idea of a University is a vital part of the history of liberal education and offers a roadmap for the future as academia continues to change and develop.
This classic of Christian apologetics seeks to persuade the skeptic that there are good reasons to believe in God even though it is impossible to understand the deity fully. First written over a century ago, the Grammar of Assent speaks as powerfully to us today as it did to its first readers. Because of the informal, non-technical character of Newman's work, it still retains its immediacy as an invaluable guide to the nature of religious belief. A new introduction by Nicholas Lash reviews the background of the Grammar, highlights its principal themes, and evaluates its philosophical originality.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
These remarkable sermons by John Henry Newman (1801-1890) were first published at Oxford in 1843, two years before he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Published here in its entirety is the third edition of 1872 for which Newman added an additional sermon, bracketed notes, and, importantly, a comprehensive, condensed Preface. In her introduction, noted Newman scholar Mary Katherine Tillman considers the volume as an integral whole, showing how all of the sermons systematically relate to the central theme of the faith-reason relationship.
Rise and Progress of Universities and Benedictine Essays contains a selection of publications from the middle (1854-56) and late (1858-59) periods of John Henry Newman's association with the Catholic University of Ireland. The Rise and Progress of Universities consists of the twenty articles first published in the Catholic University Gazette from 1854-56. The last two essays of this volume, the Benedictine Essays, originally appeared in The Atlantis, which Newman instituted specifically for the publication of research by his faculty.
An introduction to this volume, written by noted Newman scholar Mary Katherine Tillman, emphasizes the integral relation between the Rise and Progress of Universities essays on the historical development of universities, and Newman's bare and necessary idea of a university, as set forth in his seminal work, The Idea of a University.
The essays in this volume were written when John Henry Newman was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He wrote the first, on biblical miracles The Miracles of Scripture, in 1825-26, as a relatively young man; the other, The Miracles of Early Ecclesiastical History, was written in 1842-43. A comparison of the two essays displays a shift in Newman's theological stances.
In the earlier essay, Newman argues in accordance with the theology of evidence of his time, maintaining that the age of miracles was limited to those recorded in the Old Testament scriptures and in the Gospels and Acts. He asserts that biblical miracles served to demonstrate the divine inspiration of biblical revelation and to attest to the divinity of Christ. However, with the end of the apostolic age, the age of miracles came to an end; miracles reported from the early ages of the Church Newman dismissed as suspicious and possibly fraudulent. With this view, Newman entered into an ongoing debate between the skepticism of Hume and Paine and its continuation in the utilitarianism of Bentham, on the one hand, and the views of Christian apologists rebutting Hume's arguments, on the other.
In The Miracles of Early Ecclesiastical History, Newman can be seen as coming closer to accepting the doctrines of the Catholic Church. He rejects the stance he took in The Miracles of Scripture, now arguing for a continuity of sacred history between the biblical and ecclesiastical periods. He had clearly abandoned the position of evidence theologians that miracles ended after the time of the Apostles. Newman's movement between the writing of the two essays is essentially a growing into a deeper awareness of the Church as a divine society in whose life miracles and supernatural gifts were to be expected.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
These remarkable sermons by John Henry Newman (1801-1890) were first published at Oxford in 1843, two years before he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Published here in its entirety is the third edition of 1872 for which Newman added an additional sermon, bracketed notes, and, importantly, a comprehensive, condensed Preface. In her introduction, noted Newman scholar Mary Katherine Tillman considers the volume as an integral whole, showing how all of the sermons systematically relate to the central theme of the faith-reason relationship.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
John Henry Newman's The Church of the Fathers contains some of his earliest writings on fourth-century Christianity. Composed at about the same time as The Arians of the Fourth Century and the first Tracts of the Oxford Movement, this polemical book was aimed at the general reader and is filled with extracts from Patristic writings.
In 1833 British Parliament enacted the controversial Irish Church Temporalities Bill, which proposed abolishing ten of the twenty-two sees of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Newman accused the State of violating the ancient doctrine of Apostolic Succession. In The Church of the Fathers, Newman draws parallels between the situation facing the Church in the fourth century and the Anglican Church in his day.
Published here for the first time in more than a century, this edition of The Church of the Fathers reunites material that had become separated in ongoing republications of Newman's works. The text and appendices also contain original Newman material that has never before been published.
In November 1851, John Henry Newman was appointed President of the new Catholic University of Ireland, with a vague brief as to structure and personnel. He commented, I mean to be Chancellor, Rector, Provost, Professor, Tutor all at once, and no one else anything. He had to wait until June 1854 for the bishops to approve the university's statutes before he was installed as Rector. The first eight sermons collected in this volume were preached during Mass in the University Church on St Stephen's Green between May 4, 1856, and February 22, 1857. By the time the first edition of Sermons Preached on Various Occasions was published, Newman had already written to the Irish bishops that he intended to resign in November 1857--he was finally convinced that his seven-year commitment to Ireland was sufficient. He was to leave behind not only the nascent new Catholic University, but also the University Church, designed by his friend John Hungerford Pollen, and which he had paid for himself.
The remaining sermons were written for the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, the Risorgimento in Italy and its repercussions on the papacy, and the death of two friends, Dr. Weedall and James Hope Scott. The sermons on the situation of the church in England and Wales, and then of the papacy itself in Italy, reflect a redefinition of the role of Catholicism in the development of the modern world.
For the first time, the majority of John Henry Cardinal Newman's contributions to the ground-breaking series Tracts for the Times have been collected in one volume, with an introduction and notes supplied by James Tolhurst.
The Tracts for the Times will always be connected with the Oxford Movement. John Henry Newman and other leaders of the movement sought a renewal of catholic, or Roman Catholic, thought and practice within the Church of England. They published their ideas on the theological, pastoral, and devotional problems that they perceived within the church in ninety Tracts for the Times (1833-1841).
Newman, who edited the series, either wrote or compiled a third of the tracts. Increasingly, the tracts were expanded into treatises--especially after Tract 36--and were often composed of quotations from patristic writers and the English Divines. Tracts 83 and 85 are included in Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, volume VII of the Birmingham Oratory Millennium Edition of his works. Tracts 74, 76, and 88 have been omitted here. In Tract 75, the introductory explanation of the breviary has been included.
It may seem surprising to discover that a Catholic cardinal was a novelist, and Newman advanced this as an obstacle to his own canonization: Saints are not literary men, he wrote, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales. He was only fit to black the saints' shoes--if Saint Philip uses blacking, in heaven.
The background to Loss and Gain was a controversial one. Newman wrote the book in part to provide a title for publication by James Burns, of the later celebrated firm of Burns and Oates, who had lost his stable of Anglican authors by converting in 1847 to Catholicism.
An understanding of the novel requires some knowledge of its Oxford background, of the university setting, which was compared in the fierceness of its loyalties by Newman's friend Richard Church to a Renaissance Italian city, implying an assassin with a stiletto round every corner. In short, there is a sense in which, in spite of its fictional character, Loss and Gain is a work of controversy, full of echoes of old battles over whether the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer should be interpreted in a Catholic or a Protestant sense. It is a response, like Newman's other works, to a challenge, and so its hero, Charles Reding, as a student in Oxford, passes through the hands of the representatives of a number of Anglican parties and schools of theology before resolving his doubts in Rome.