A reference work for the Newman shelf — and for anyone who finds the saint’s flowing, elaborate, complex, Victorian prose daunting. Dave Armstrong mined more than 40 of John Henry Newman’s books, sermons, letters, and tracts to produce substantive passages on over 100 topics — Angels, Absolution, the Bible, Confession, the Eucharist, Infallibility, the Sacraments, the Saints, Transubstantiation, the Trinity — arranged alphabetically and cited precisely.
Armstrong’s debt to Newman is personal: he was received into the Catholic Church in 1990, exactly a hundred years after Newman’s death, largely as a result of reading the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The selection focuses on theology and Church history rather than philosophy, education, or poetry — the areas Armstrong judged most useful for catechesis and apologetics. Quotations from Newman’s Anglican years lean toward the proto-Catholic positions he later embraced.
With a Foreword by Joseph Pearce. Originally published by Sophia Institute Press, October 2012.
Inside this book
- Over 100 alphabetical topics, from Absolution through Transubstantiation and the Trinity
- Quotations drawn from 40+ of Newman’s works — sermons, letters, tracts, theology, biography
- Joseph Pearce Foreword
- Chronological ordering within topics, so the reader can trace doctrinal development across Newman’s career
- Chapter-and-section references (not page numbers) so the citations work across every edition of Newman’s collected works
> “A wonderful addition to Newman scholarship.”
> — Fr. Peter M. J. Stravinskas, The Catholic Response (Vol. IX, No. 4, Jan/Feb 2013)
