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Newman’s Politics
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was not a political figure in the modern sense. He understood the world primarily as a historical theologian. His life spanned a transformative era in British history, and his opinions, fairly interpreted as old-fashioned Tory or Traditionalist, were shaped by his deep suspicion of secular progress. From the 1830s the British…
Newman & Charles Dickens
These two Victorian giants who, despite moving in different social and intellectual circles, shared a profound concern for the “soul” of England during the Industrial Revolution. Newman (1801-1890) and Dickens (1812-1870) represent two responses to the onset of the Machine Age. Dickens fought the machine with sentiment and satire; Newman fought it with theology and…
Newman & Dr Johnson
John Henry Newman read, studied and imitated Samuel Johnson’s style as one of the foundational influences on his own prose style. Attentive also to the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Wordsworth, his intellectual and literary roots were firmly planted in the English Augustan tradition of the eighteenth century of which Johnson was the titan. Included…
Newman & The Poets
On Poetry and Poets I Introduction This essay traces Saint John Henry Newman’s encounters, intellectual, moral, spiritual and literary, with the poets of the English tradition, from medieval poets to the Victorian poets of his own day, and it explores his influence on two Catholic poets of the twentieth century. A poet himself, his widest…
Catholic Converts
Melanie McDonagh, Converts, From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, Yale University Press 2025 In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Christ and the Soldier’, an honest Tommy passes by a stone roadside cross somewhere on the Western Front. When he starts chatting to the crucified figure, he hears a whispered reply:…
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