In this series of articles, Fr. Peter Conley aims to reflect, creatively, upon Newman’s pastoral insights into the experience of grief among, himself, his family, friends, parishioners and the wider community of faith. The first two articles in his series are published herein: The Complexity of Condolence and Inhabiting Grief’s Heart. Future planned articles revolve around the following themes of Grief as Encounter, Grief as Wound, Grief as Communion, and Newman and the Victorian Culture of Bereavement.

This essay, which was originally presented at the first Coloquio Internacional at the Guadalajara Campus of the Universidad Panamericana, Mexico, October 8-10, is a short introduction to Newman’s writings in six areas—autobiography, philosophy, theology, literature, education and spirituality—along with some suggestions for additional reading, particularly for those beginning Newman studies.

By apologetics one generally means the kind of intellectual apologetics that we find in Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine, Apologia, and Grammar of Assent. But Newman was also the persuasive apologist of the imagination, particularly in his two novels and Difficulties of Anglicans and Present Position of Catholics. In Loss and Gain Newman takes his readers into a Catholic church to experience the reality of Catholic worship, an imaginative experience designed to impress upon their imagination the difference between a real and an unreal religion. In Difficulties of Anglicans he warns Anglo-Catholics against the misuse of the imagination when unguided by the reason. But the misuse does not take away the use, and he explains how important a part imagination had played in his own conversion to Rome. The analogies he presses on the imaginations of his Anglo-Catholic readers are nothing to the analogies he piles up in Present Position of Catholics, where the most vivid imagery in all his writings is to be found, as he employs shock tactics in his attempt to delete the anti-Catholic stain on the English Protestant imagination. And finally in Callista, Newman practically abandons his most famous apologetic argument from conscience for the existence of God in favour of a direct appeal to the imagination of the heroine, to her need for liberation from self-imprisonment, a liberation that she can only find in the image of an incarnate God.

This paper, given at NINS on October 15, 2015, explores J. H. Newman’s rethinking of the concept of tradition. Whereas Romantic historicism and sentimentalism conceptions frame the past as an inventory of ’’information” or as a focal point of affective reminiscence, Newman approaches tradition as a continuous and ongoing development that shows past and present becoming progressively more intelligible and mutually illuminating. Agents of knowledge do not “define” or “possess” the past as an accomplished “tradition” but, on the contrary, realize their human and spiritual potential by a humble, active, and open-ended participation in the development of tradition.

This article looks at Newman’s treatment of superstition in the early Church in his revised edition of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1878) and compares it to the way the Whig historians treated superstition in their work, in order to show how the historian in Newman demonstrates how first-century and nineteenth- century perceptions of superstition reaffirm the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church.

This essay is a reflection of the time I have spent working with Cardinal Newman’s archive at the Birmingham Oratory. I have had a chance to stop and carefully read his letters and diaries and to see Newman as a communicator extraordinaire! I suspect that the Cardinal would have had great command of today’s social media and communications technology. His laity could have been a wider and larger audience on a virtual level. Might this be an opportunity for a sociological comparison of the great writers and speakers of an earlier time with those of us in today’s media-rich world? With whom else might Newman have interacted? We may never know with certainty, but it would be fun to imagine.

A reading of Newman’s life and writings in a liturgical perspective is an innovative and pertinent task. This article analyses six of Newman’s sermons, preached between 1829 and 1831, in their liturgical context. It offers us, in germ, an outline of his liturgical theology. Newman persistently subordinated sermons to public prayer. Every church activity, primarily preaching, is directed toward liturgical worship. He defines liturgy etymologically as “public service.” “Public” refers to the ecclesial nature of liturgy, within its two dimensions: corporate and pneumatic. “Service” refers to two aspects, which are always intertwined: it denotes the sacrificial and thanksgiving character of liturgy. Liturgy is our self-sacrifice and our praise to God. In Newman's view, liturgy is the primary repository of apostolic teaching and Church tradition. Consequently, it is the best teacher of faith formation. Thus, in Newman, there is constant interaction between liturgy and life of faith.

John Henry Newman made use of an analogy between the Holy Spirit in the life of Christ and the Spirit in the life of the Church: as the Spirit indwelled and empowered the incarnate Christ during his earthly life, so the Spirit indwells and empowers the Church in the present age. Newman’s use of this particular analogy sheds light on his doctrine of the co-synkatabasis of the Son and Spirit in salvation history, affirms the weight he gave to the process of divinization in his soteriology, and remains indispensable for a full picture of Newman’s ecclesiology.

Several Newman commentators consider that his work has been ignored by philosophers. This essay re-examines Newman’s work in relation to the particularist approach to the “problem of the criterion” in order to see whether or not Marty Maddox’s methodist depiction of Newman’s Grammar of Assent has actually obscured Newman’s relevance to this contemporary philosophical position.

This paper explores Louis Bouyer’s indebtedness to Cardinal Newman in developing a sacramental cosmology in his monograph Cosmos. It connects Bouyer to Newman on the level of shared theological themes and biographical imitation. It shows some of the ways in which Bouyer’s theology of the mystery of creation is an extension and development of Newman’s thinking on the invisible world, especially as articulated in Parochial and Plain Sermons and Apologia.