John Henry Newman and His Age. By Owen F.Cummings. Pp. xv, 180, Eugene, OR, Cascade Books, 2019, $19.74.

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-127
Author(s):  
Patrick Madigan
Keyword(s):  
John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Hurley
Keyword(s):  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Definition Of

Newman has been much vaunted as a ‘master’ of non-fiction prose style, and justly so. His felicity of phrasing is astonishing: so precise, so elegant, so vivid. This chapter admires Newman’s stylistic achievements too, but with a view to explaining why Newman himself baulked at such praise, by insisting instead on the importance of veracity over verbalism. While a number of different writings by Newman are surveyed in the course of the chapter, the argument comes to focus in particular on his seminal work of faith, Grammar of Assent, a book that took him some twenty years to write, which almost killed him, and which best exemplifies his suggestive but enigmatic definition of ‘style’ as ‘a thinking out into language’.

Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Over Time

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.

John Henry Newman and His Age by Owen F. Cummings

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-110
Author(s):  
Reed Frey
Keyword(s):  
John Henry Newman

The legacy of John Henry Newman for Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-97
Author(s):  
Philippe Bordeyne ◽  
James Hawkey
Keyword(s):  
John Henry Newman

The Reception of Turner's Newman: A Reply to Simon Skinner

2012 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-548
Author(s):  
EAMON DUFFY
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
University History ◽  
General Readership ◽  
History Department ◽  
The Right

In his article on the critical reception of the late Frank Turner's John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion, Simon Skinner contends that Turner's study is ‘empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous’, and he cites with approval Andrew Wilson's judgement that it ‘revolutionizes Newman studies’.1 But this historical masterpiece, he thinks, has been unjustly howled down by a benighted posse of Roman Catholic reviewers, ‘almost none of [whom] are … tenured in a university history department’. Turner's Catholic reviewers, ‘which is to say nearly all reviewers’, are therefore ‘amateurs’, who ‘literally could not comprehend’ what Turner was up to.2 But history is not an arcane discipline, and Skinner's complaint about the ‘lack of disciplinary equipment’ of these hostile reviewers seems hardly to the point in relation to a book offered by a major publisher to a general readership. The ordinary rules of historical evidence are intelligible to anybody, and a de haut en bas restriction of the right to an opinion on Turner's book to the gild of professional historians runs the risk of seeming both arbitrary and condescending.

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